The Destroyer1
by windeer
Summary: Unedited version of The Destroyer.
1. 1

_The high clear sound of the temple bells were the first things she heard in the morning and the last thing she heard at night, every day of every year. They summoned her from sleep in the dim morning, so she could bathe with cold water and rub cleansing oils into her skin before she knelt on the small woven mat before the altar for her morning prayers. Twice more, every morning, they signaled the times for devotion and she would find herself with her forehead pressed against the floor, her voice rising and falling in the ancient mantras, the various chants and recitations that marked a life of observance. They rang when it was time to eat the midday meal, and when they worked in the fields they told them when it was time to kneel among the long stalks of grain or the fruit trees and pray again, two more times throughout the afternoon. They rang at dusk, and again after it was dark to mark the official end of the day, and both times the entire settlement found its way to their knees. This was the way life worked, had always worked, as long as she remembered. There had never been any other way_

_Most days, after the midday meal, she would have joined her parents and two brothers in the fields. It was late spring and the planting was done, but there was still plenty of work to do. That day, the day that her childhood ended, however, she was being punished. She had started a fight at the small school near the spring where the main settlement sent their children to learn from Alliance teachers and where their village sent the children to gather fresh water. The children did not like her, or any of the members of the religious settlement, anymore than their parents did. They did not understand why these strange people rejected advanced farming equipment, power, computers and all the other things that made life what it was in this day and age. Did not understand why they lined the cattle tracks to pray for the animals being led to slaughter in the high meadows. Did not understand their ceaseless bells or strange songs or the incense and garlands of flowers they hung on their altars. With this profound lack of understanding came ire and disrespect, suspicion and hatred. It was not unexpected._

_``But father, they vandalized the temple! I heard them talking about it!`` She protested as her father had lit the incense sticks on the altar in her room. A month ago someone had smeared the walls of their temple with bulls' blood. It had taken the guru six days of fasting and prayer to sanctify it, and the bells had been silent all that time._

_``It does not matter.`` Her father replied sternly. ``In this house, we follow the way of _ahimsa _in all things, not only when it suits us. All things are a part of God, and thus all things are a part of each other. To do violence to one is to do violence to all. I thought you knew this. I am disappointed.``_

_Her heart sunk into her feet at his words and she looked down, ashamed of herself. Her father handed her a scroll, wrapped tight and tied with blue ribbon. She recognized it, as every single person she knew would. The Bhagavad Gita had been read to her since she slumbered in her mother's womb, dreaming of life. She knew every word._

_``Read, meditate, pray.`` Her father said simply. ``When they day is over we will see what you have learned.``_

_Ever the dutiful daughter she obeyed, even when her legs went numb and sharp lines of white pain began climbing up her spine she stayed in position, her mind expanding in time with the swell of her deep breathing. She was so deep in the trance, in contemplation of the divine script, that at first she did not hear the screaming coming from the field. By the time she pulled herself to her feet, her legs feeling half liquid in places and stiff as rock in others it was very near. She went to the window and drew away the cotton curtain, peeking out onto the narrow street._

_Batarian slavers were a risk that every colonist took, but seeing them made her legs give out, carried from under her in a wave of sudden terror. They were clustered at the far end of the street, watching as two of their fellows dragged the new mother, Parvati, from her home. She did not see the baby before she dropped out of sight, but the woman`s wailing and wordless shrieking made it unnecessary to actually see anything. She heard a bang, loud as thunder from the distant mountains and Parvati`s screaming suddenly stopped. She let out a low sound that was somewhere between a whine and a sob as she heard the front door of her own house swing open and bang against the wall._

_She forced her legs to work, to carry her over to the closet and slip inside the small dark space. She closed the door and squeezed under the bureau. Another year and she wouldn`t have fit, less yoga and she would not have been able to wiggle the trapdoor free and fold her long legs and arms together well enough to fit in, pulling it closed after her. She had barely fixed the cover back in place, her breath loud and ragged in her ears, when the door to her room opened unseen. _

_``I told you, there`s no one in here.`` Voices unlike anything she had ever heard before, rough and soft, given sense by the translator chip installed in her left ear but still tasting alien. ``This is a waste of time. Farmers are in the fields, they always are.``_

_``Farmers don`t leave candles burning in their bedrooms while they`re in the fields.`` A second voice, a second pair of heavy boots dragging across the floor. ``Idiot.``_

_``Who said humans were smart?`` The first voice asked. There was a huge crash, the sound of breaking glass. They had flipped the bed over, she realized. They were looking for her. ``Especially their religious colonies. All of them, completely stupid. It`s a wonder they managed the wheel.``_

_She began to pray silently as they opened the closet door. She could hear them tear down the clothes, pull out boxes and pull the bureau face down. They seemed to be enjoying the destruction more than anything. They laughed quietly, joking in voices too low for her to make out. She continued praying, her mind gibbering a loose conglomeration of hopes and recitations. They were breaking things, the bureau, the bed; she heard them upend the altar and her soul burned as though physically struck. Finally, they went quiet, and for a moment she thought they might have left, that it could really have been that easy._

_``What have we here?`` The first alien laughed, and then sunlight was spilling into her dark hole, and she looked up to see four cruel eyes glaring down at her, full of darkness and dread. She opened her mouth to scream but he hit her, strangling the sound in her throat. Grabbing a handful of her hair he dragged her out and she screamed then, a thick guttural sound clogged by her rapidly swelling lips. He hit her again and something snapped, her face exploding in white pain. Her mouth filled with blood as the alien tossed her down on the floor among chips of wood and glass. The candles had gone out when they flipped the altar; pools of white wax littered the floor like tears. ``Thought you could hide did you?``_

_Sobbing she gripped her nose, where the pain seemed the most vicious, blinding in its intensity. She curled up on the floor as he kicked her, his booted toe seeking out her ribs, once, twice and again. Something broke inside her. Only the hand of his companion stopped him._

_``Don`t kill it.`` He chided. _

_``Why the hell not? We came to get males for the mines, not these soft, weak little things.`` As they spoke, she spat blood and began to pray again, out loud now since nothing would save her. _

_``Boss said we could make use of them before we killed them, though.`` The first alien was saying. She was not listening, not really. Her mind was filled with light, the bright intensity of pain, the red haze of panic. As her prayers grew louder, clearer, both receded behind clarity and purpose._

_``You`re disgusting.`` The second alien was saying. ``Not only is it a human, but it`s a child. You can`t really want to-`` He glanced back at her as she folded her legs under herself, arms crossed over her burning ribs. She could feel the jagged break under her fingers, but ignored it, her prayers growing louder. ``What`s it saying? My translator isn`t synched for this dialect.``_

_She glared up at them, her rage two sparks of light in her deep, almost black, eyes. She had never felt this fire before, which raged in her core, wanting to lash out and break these two invaders to pieces. Anger had never been necessary, never had any place in the calm serenity of prayer and meditation. Even when she`d fought the boys who desecrated their temple, she had not felt like this. She spat blood again, her brain flooded with the sharp metallic taste of it. ``I am invoking the Destroyer upon you. Lord Shiva and his wife Kalima will descend on you if you try to hurt me. Hurt me and you only hurt yourselves. Kill me and you kill yourself.``_

_Her only response was laughter that touched the hard centre of her faith and made it tremble in her chest. Fearlessly the alien that had hit her kicked the statue of Shiva that had fallen off the altar against the wall. One of his arms broke off and the alien stomped over to it, crushing it beneath his heavy boots. She remained silent, stony, staring at him as he desecrated everything she believed in. After he had broken the statue into pieces he spat on it and wiped his mouth, grinning._

_``I don`t think we have anything to worry about from the Lord Shiva.`` He laughed. Turning, he headed to the door. ``Use it if you want then. But be quick, I`m not waiting around for you. That shouldn`t be difficult for you.``_

_The other alien rounded on her as his companion left, the blow he unleashed across her partially destroyed face making the world swim in and out of focus, seas of white agony flooding her vision. He threw her down on the shattered remains of the bed, broken pieces of wood jabbing into her at every angle. She could hear his tense, quick breathing as he rummaged with his clothes, uttering a soft curse and she could feel something dark and terrible growing within her, threatening to escape. When he touched her, pulling roughly at her arm to turn her over onto her back she screamed, feeling that darkness lunge forward. Blue fire flared all around her, from her eyes and mouth and hands as she lunged at him._

_The half naked would-be rapist had about three seconds to contemplate his impending doom before a ball of pure biotic energy smashed directly into his groin, tearing away a huge chunk of flesh and shattering bone with a wet popping sound. He howled, stumbling back as she wrenched the pistol at his hip from its holster. She had never held a gun, it hung in her small hands like an anvil. She raised it as the first alien died, gasping and vomiting blood over the wood floor. As his companion burst through the door she shot him three times and dropped the gun, her hands burning from the discharge of heat. _

_Three bullets proved to be enough. The second alien was blown back through the door and there was no sound from the other room. She sank down at the floor, cradling her blistered hands in her lap. The skin across her knuckles and the back of her hand had split from the heat, and blood began to ooze slowly out of the cracks to stain the whiteness of her skirt. The fire ebbed, fading away to lay dormant as it had for her entire life. On the commune biotics were accepted only if they never revealed their powers to anyone. The implants had been only to afford her the control it took to never use the strange powers prenatal exposure to element zero granted. Such power inevitably led to unnatural bloodshed, a violation of the most basic tenants of_ ahimsa. _Looking down at the man she had just killed with them she began to laugh in high, hysterical bursts that pierced the stinking air of the small house. She could hear gunshots outside, each stuttering explosion of noise a herald of her imminent demise. She couldn`t fight all of them._

_She was still laughing when the Alliance soldiers found her. It was their gunshots she had heard through the broken window, as they attempted to save the captured settlers. The man who appeared at the doorway, stepping over the corpse of the alien she had shot, was a faceless monstrosity of polished armour, even the glass of his helmet tinted. There was nothing human in him, and she faced him with the same hopeless surrender she would a Batarian._

_``You`re safe now.`` He said finally, advancing further into the room. His eyes flickered to the other corpse, but he said nothing, just knelt down in front of her._

_``I`m Commander Anderson. I`m here to take you away.`` He took his helmet off and she was greeted by a surprisingly human face, set with deep brown eyes that looked at her with boundless pity. She shook her head, not sure what to say. What it was possible to say to such news._

_``Where`s my family?`` She asked._

_``They`re dead.`` He answered flatly._

_``How do you know?`` She asked, her voice growing high, childlike with denial. She stood up, pitching violently from side to side as her legs threatened to collapse under her. He moved to follow her but she planted her swollen, bleeding hands on his shoulders and pushed him. Her biotics, restrained so perfectly for so long, flared to life again, wrapping her in a shroud of blazing blue light. The soldier stumbled, halfway between crouching and standing and fell backwards in surprise. ``How do you KNOW?``_

_``Everyone is dead.`` He replied, staring up at her without fear, without pity now either. She turned away, her fists clenching through the agony of her burns. ``Everyone but you. We need to go.``_

_For a moment she looked as though she might speak, but in the end she merely turned away, the rage and biotics melting off of her as quickly as they had come. She shut her eyes and nodded, her long black hair hanging over her face. He picked her up, she was only thirteen after all, and carried her from the house like that. _

_She closed her eyes, so she wouldn`t see the bodies in the streets, the familiar faces twisted into masks of death, and a sudden and consuming exhaustion overcame her. As the rock of the soldiers steady gate and the silence, the absolute and complete silence overtook her and carried her to sleep she sighed and looked up toward the temple on the hill and saw the plumes of smoke and the barren, twisted black skeleton of its supports. There were no bells. There never would be again._

Commander Shepard opened her eyes and sat up suddenly in her bed in the Normandy`s captain's cabin. She could hear a distant melody in the back of her mind, sharp and clear, crystalline. Like bells. She sighed, running her fingers through the short, tight curls of her blond hair. Her hand came away greasy and still smelling like whiskey. She made a face, bile rising in the back of her throat as she realized exactly how hung-over she really way.

She supposed she deserved it. Both the hangover and all the drinking she had done in order to accomplish it. While the Normandy was docked at the Citadel for the astounding body and system repairs required to get it running a full capacity again there was nothing much to do but celebrate being alive after spending so long convinced they would be dead by now. She had held off on most of the partying that the crew, or at least certain members of it, were enjoying. She had been saying goodbye to Samara, then monitoring the repairs until the mechanics told her to fuck off and let them work, and then she had the mundane details of being alive to re-establish. She had died. Life insurance had been claimed, her will had been read and carried out to some extent thought most of it was still clogged up in legal bullshit and all her personal possessions had been shipped to one place or another. Bailey`s magic button had gotten the paperwork out of the way but now that it seemed she might be around a bit longer there were a lot of details to go into.

Last night, even those had run out and Donnely had dragged her out to the Dark Star Lounge to a proper celebration. She had gone only slightly grudgingly. It was not that she did not want to spend time with the crew. It was just that she had never been very good at being a normal human being. She was in her element on the battlefield, giving orders and pursuing goals with relentless force and determination. Trying to make small talk over dinner was something much more difficult and nerve wracking then blowing a mech`s head off.

That explained the drinking. She moaned as she pulled herself out of bed, wincing at the stink clinging to her skin. Apparently she had been smoking last night too, or at least licking ashtrays. She made her way to the bathroom and leaned over the sink, examining herself in the mirror. As always, it took her a little while to get used to the sight.

The broken nose was the only thing she really recognized anymore. Before she had died, her skin had been beginning to sag, crow's feet collecting in the corners of her eyes, laugh and frown lines where appropriate. The Lazarus Project had apparently decided that a face lift was in order, because now her face looked like it had before Torfan, smooth, unblemished and a deep, dusty golden brown in colour. Her large, dark eyes had once been brown, but they were now under lit by cybernetics and appeared more orange in some light, and black most of the rest of the time. Leaning back she lifted up her shirt and cocked her head to the side. Lazarus had also decided a boob job was in order, though she could not complain about being thirty four with a fresh rack free of sag or stretch marks it still felt odd to look at her own body. Letting her shirt drop again, she traced the thin lines which were all that remained of the thick network of scars that had once dominated her face, then the hook of her nose that had been deformed by that break all those years ago.

That dream... She sighed, and turned toward the shower, attempting to put it out of her mind. Mindoir was lifetimes ago. Eons. She had not thought of it in years, had not dreamed of it since longer still. As she stripped off the black tank top and underwear she had worn to bed she could not stop her mind from wandering backwards, touching long buried memories of the houses between the hills on that distant world.

After showering she tried in vain to scrub the taste of ass out of her mouth, and failing, did an hour and a half of yoga before her hunger drove her down. At least the increased circulation and exercise had put some colour back in her face and eased the pitch of her stomach. As she dressed in simple black pants and a black, form-fitted black shirt she thought about the draped sari and wide-legged work pants of her childhood. As she waited for the elevator outside her quarters she thought about riding horses down to the spring to draw water in wooden pails. That world seemed like something out of a history book to her now, not a moment from her own life. She tapped at her omnitool to see what damage last nights bender had done to her bank account and winced slightly. She must have covered the entire bars tab. Then again, it was surprising what dying did to your financial state. She could still afford a whole manner of ridiculous things if she had a mind to. She glanced up as the elevator bespoke its arrival with a soft ding, a new addition which was already annoying her. She would have to tell Donnely to get rid of it.

``Rupert! Do you have anything greasy and delicious that will purge the monstrous hangover I`m feeling ?`` She asked as she arrived in the mess hall. The cheerful sergeant looked up and pursed his lips like he always did when she arrived in his kitchen.

``I don`t know what I can do for a vegetarian. Sit down and we`ll see.`` He seemed to take her refusal to eat meat as some sort of personal attack on his cooking but Shepard did not bother to explain it to him. Truth be told, she had just never eaten meat. It was forbidden in her village on Mindoir, and she had never seen the point in picking it up as a habit.

She frowned slightly. There she was, thinking of Mindoir again. This was beginning to bother her, in a vague sort of way. She had long ago moved past what happened there, in face of greater needs demanding her attention. There was no reason for her thoughts or dreams to linger there.

``What`s a vegetarian?`` Garrus asked, appearing suddenly from the long hall that led down to the main battery. Shepard smiled as he took a seat across from her, picking at something stuck between her teeth from last night.

``It means she`s a salad-munching hippy.`` Rupert called from the kitchen as he began banging pans around. Her lifted a lid to stir something and a cloud of fragrant steam escaped, spreading itself along the cieling and curling slowly into the vents. Shepard grinned at the turian`s confused expression.

``It means I don`t eat meat.`` She explained. ``Human`s are omnivorous by nature, but we can get all our necessary nutrition from plants.``

``Says you.`` The cook quipped.

``Oh.`` Garrus looked between the two of them for a moment and then cocked his head to the side. It was an expression she recognized, the one he always used when he did not quite understand something about humans, or any other race really. Then again, turian teeth were sharp and pointed, ideal for tearing meat but not so much for nibbling leaves. She doubted salads were very present in their diet. ``Why wouldn`t you eat meat? It`s delicious.``

``So I keep hearing.`` She replied, going to retrieve a drink from the fridge. She barely noticed when she dodged those kind of questions anymore. It just seemed normal.

``You don`t eat meat?`` Jacob`s voice, blurry with its own aftermath of a hangover, materialized along with the man. He fixed bloodshot eyes on his Commander as she poked a straw into a tetra pack of pineapple juice. Everyone kept thanking her for upgrading the ration quality on the ship, but it had not been a selfless act. She did not enjoy the tasteless yet functional hard tack anymore than they did.

``No! I have never in my life taken a bite of anything that once knew fear.`` Shepard replied, raising both hands above her head.

``Really?`` Miranda`s voice chimed from the direction of her office. Despite being just as drunk as anyone else last night, she appeared flawless as ever, already perfectly dressed with her hair done and her subtle makeup applied. Shepard felt slouchey and plain next to her, but that was nothing special. ``Anything that once knew fear? Are you one of THOSE kind of vegetarians?``

``No. Not really. I just... don`t eat meat. It`s a long and boring story, but I grew up not eating it. There didn`t seem to be any point to starting.`` Shepard crossed her arms over her chest, glaring at her inquisition that continued to stare right back at her, as though amused to see her put on the spot. ``What`s the deal anyway? Why so interested in my dining habits?``

``I don`t know. You never told me you were a vegetarian.`` Miranda replied. She looked curious, even. Shepard shook her head, shrugging again and sucking the last drops of juice from the pack with a burst of lusty slurping.

``You never asked.`` She replied.

``The point of eating meat is bacon.`` Jacob interrupted helpfully. ``Especially on mornings like these. Though you don`t seem to be feeling the two bottles of whiskey you put away last night the way I thought you would. You can drink your face off Commander.``

``I`m nothing special, Jacob. You`re just a lightweight.`` She quipped back. She glanced over her shoulder as Rupert thrust a steaming plate in her direction.

``Monteray jack omelette with fresh mango salsa. Does that work for you, princess?`` He asked gruffly. She might have thought that Rupert was really bothered by her steadfast denial to try even a little bite of his various meat-filled masterpiece meals, if not for the fact he always complained about her with a huge grin on his face. She accepted the plate with an eager nod.

``Forget Zakera Café. You`re the best Rupe.`` She took the plate and headed in the direction of the Starboard Observatory.

``Too good to eat breakfast with us, Commander?`` Jacob called after her.

``I`m just worried what the next topic of investigation is going to be if I stick around.`` She called over her shoulder, as she vanished around the huge metal column that housed the elevator. ``Enjoy your dead flesh!``

``With pleasure!`` Jacob called back after her, his voice just barely reaching her as she strolled past crew quarters, the fragrant steam of her heaping omelette making her stomach rumble. She paused in front of the life support room, chewing on a hunk of mango from the salsa and wondering if it was too early to pay Thane a visit.

It was odd, she supposed, how much time she spent in there as compared to with the rest of the crew. Not that she did not talk and visit with everyone, but with Thane it was different. He did not expect anything from her, not even conversation if she was not feeling up to it. Their friendship was comforting to her, when she could just go and sit with him, read a little or share music or anything that did not require her to come up with endless topics for short, meaningless conversations. He seemed genuinely glad to have her there, genuinely happy with their odd companionship. She still hesitated, not wanting to wake him if he was still sleeping but doubting he was.

``Do you always stand out here this long?`` The familiar voice with its cool undertones of amusement startled her and she jumped, almost losing her grip on her breakfast. She turned to see him emerging from the men`s room, looking just as immaculate and composed as ever. She grinned sheepishly and shook her head.

``I wasn`t sure if you were awake.`` She replied, sucking the salsa sticking to her thumb off. Rupert had really outdone himself, the entire dish seemed to exude a fine aura of deliciousness.

``I was not drinking last night, and therefore did not feel the need to sleep until the early afternoon.`` Thane replied, the lightest echo of teasing in his voice. He glanced down at her breakfast, one of his scaled brow ridges rising. ``That smells amazing. If Rupert is making that for breakfast I may have to go indulge despite my lack of liquid justification.``

``He made it special. Everyone else seems to be getting toast and bacon for breakfast. But since you`re awake, we could share.`` She lifted one foot and kicked the holographic pad to allow them access to the life support room.

``I didn`t know being Commander entitled you to special meals. But I am grateful you decided to share your blessings.`` Thane replied, following her in as she made her way to the small table that looked over the drive core.

``I don`t- it doesn`t-`` She tried to protest, before catching the edge of his grin. It had taken her a long time to realize how much Thane teased her, and how much he enjoyed it when she did not realize that was what he was doing. Drell facial expression was apparently, not as animated as human. ``I don`t eat meat. So sometimes, Rupert does me a favour and tweaks his meals to make them a bit more green.``

``I didn`t know you were a vegetarian.`` Thane replied, sounding mildly surprised by the revelation.

``Yes, yes, news of the century. I think I just had this conversation.`` Shepard replied, shovelling the first forkful of egg and cheese into her mouth and chewing with relish.

``So am I.`` He replied, accepting the fork when she offered it to him. Apparently germs were not something they hesitated to share. Then again, in the past few months they had shared much more than that, what with family history and suicide missions and pledges to defeat the Reapers side by side. Cooties were no big deal when those kind of promises had been made. It was her turn to look surprised.

``Most Drell are. It is difficult to raise any sort of livestock on Kahje.`` He tried the omelette and smiled immediately, bobbing his head up and down in a small nod. ``And the Hanar see it as somewhat cannibalistic to eat sea creatures, so they were already vegetarians when we got there.`` He handed her back the utensil and they ate quietly for a while, the comfortable silence more engrossing then conversation in between mouthfuls.

``Do you miss Kahje?`` She asked suddenly, that stubborn melody in the back of her mind enduring even now. ``Even though...`` She trailed off, not sure exactly how to address the illness that was suffocating him in his own body.

``Even though it killed me?`` Thane asked. She nodded slightly, hoping she had not strayed outside the boundaries of their friendship. He was silent for a moment as though in deep thought and then a sudden stillness came over his face before he began speaking, quick and soft as though from far away.

``It has been hot all day, and so humid. Condensation gathers on the glass windows through the streets. There is a blush of rose and crimson on the horizon, the first cooling breezes of dusk. It whips away some of the hanging moisture, making it easier to breathe. There is laughter from somewhere unseen overhead, soft music of an undestinguishable nature floating even higher, thinned by the wind. Everything is calm. All around the sea breathes, sighing in the gathering darkness.`` He fell silent again, blinking as he resurfaced from the vivid memory. Shepard was silent, examining the image he had painted in her head.

``It sounds beautiful.`` She said finally. He nodded, staring down at his hands folded on the table in front of him, tracing the small scales covering his knuckles.

``I do miss it. Even though.`` He said finally. ``Why do you ask?``

``I don`t know.`` Shepard lied. She did not know why she was so loathe to discuss her past with anyone, especially these people who had shared so much with her. It seemed pointless in the end. She had nothing to say about it. She really and truly was, completely over it. ``It was just a thought. I should go though, I have to go tell my see my lawyer about not being dead anymore, again. And probably do a metric fuck ton of paper work, again. Are you going to see Kolyat?``

He nodded, his expression brightening slightly. ``I am. He wants to show me some of the work he`s been doing at C-Sec.`` He looked up at her. ``I don`t think I ever told you just how grateful I am that you talked Captain Bailey into this. I... I don`t think I really can. Thank you, Shepard.``

``You don`t need to thank me.`` She replied. ``I did it for him more than you.``

``That is precisely why I must.`` She paused a moment and then smiled, standing up and collecting their dirty dishes. As she headed for the door out of the small room he called over his shoulder, in a voice slightly unsure. ``Perhaps, if you manage to finish that metric fuck ton of paper work we could have dinner together on the Citadel. I want to try more of your style of food.``

She stopped, glancing over her shoulder. Thane was staring out the window, like he always did, and there was no change to his regular posture. She shrugged, realized he could not see it and then nodded before realizing that he could not see that either.

``Sure. I`ve heard some good things about some of the restaurants there. Have you ever had indian food?`` She could not understand why this felt so odd. It was not like they were making a date. Friends had dinner with friends all the time. And though she did not deny, to herself at least, that she had been having more and more of those kind of thoughts as time went on and no word came from Kaidan, she really wasn`t looking to date.

``If one of the dishes Rupert has prepared in the past month has been indian, then yes. Otherwise, no.`` He sounded almost relieved. Almost. She could not really tell, drell being damnably hard to read at the best of times.

``Alright, I know where we can go then. I`ll send you directions when I`m done with the legal bullshit.``

``Looking forward to it.`` Thane replied. She paused a moment more, feeling like she should say something else before she turned on her heel and left the room, the back of her neck strangely hot. As she made he way out onto the hallway she ran into Donnely, who was looking worse for wear after the bender last night.

``Ahoy, commander. How`s your mornin` been?`` He asked, cradling his forehead in one hand as though the sound of his own voice caused physical pain. It probably did.

``Getting better all the time, Donnely. You`ve got vomit on your shirt you know. Just there.`` She pointed it out to him and then headed on her way, feeling her usual clarity of purpose restored, chasing the sound of bells from the back of her memory.


	2. 2

_"Do you remember me?" He asked, as he took a seat across from her in the small room. She shook her head, even though she never forgot his face. He carried her out of the blossoming hell of Mindoir, out of streets soaked with blood and littered with bodies. But this is not in a situation where she can trust anybody, especially not saviours who disappear after their work is done. He acted like her friend when she was fragile, about to fly apart at the seams, and then she never saw him again. He stopped her from self-destructing at that most critical moment, then left her alone for three years. He`s not her friend, and she knows it._

_"My name is Captain Anderson. When we first met, I was Commander Anderson." He paused, searching her face for recognition but she remained stubbornly neutral, her face full of the placid dullness that defines stupid street trash. "I was there, on Mindoir. When it happened. Are you sure you don`t remember?."_

_She shrugged, readjusting herself in her seat and wiping at the thin trail of blood still leaking down from her freshly re-broken nose. The officers had not been gentle when they arrested her, and she was expecting them to come storming in at any moment. His presence did not make sense, and she knew it, but she was practiced when it came to ignoring her own curiosity in these situations. Better to give him nothing. Her eyes flicked just momentarily to the surveillance cameras, then back to him, remaining blank and slightly glazed. He unplugged them, before sitting down again, fixing her with a penetrating stare. She gave it right back, not flinching, not even twitching. He recognized the hardness, the intense and unyielding core that she had built up since she stopped being a traumatized victim of life. He stopped trying to stare her down and opened the file he had brought with him instead. She recognized it without trying. Her juvenile offender file._

_"It looks like you`ve been busy since we last spoke... Shepard." He pronounced the name with a knowing tilt to his voice, fully aware that there was nothing real about it. She had pulled it out of the air, to satisfy the bureaucrats, to hide what she really was from everyone else. And because, it seemed, no one outside of India knew how to pronounce her given name properly. He pressed on, making no further comment about her chosen moniker. "Petty theft, theft over a thousand credits, arson, assault... if it wasn`t for the fact you`re under sixteen you`d be on a prison ship by now. Not to mention that they have a damn hard time finding any evidence against you. Sterilized crime scenes, no fingerprints, security cameras overloaded. Even evidence lockers broken into with the evidence stolen, right out of a police station one time, and no way to find out who did it. I wonder how things keep turning out so well for you."_

_She shrugged again, not about to play the entrapment game._

_"Do you know why I`m here?" He asked. Her silence was getting to him, she could see the vein in his forehead building up, beginning to show through the light brown of his unblemished forehead. She shook her head, remaining mute. _

_He settled back in his chair, staring at her, trying to decide something. At length he leaned forward again, flipping the folder closed. "I want to help you." He said finally. That did it for her. She burst out laughing, wiping at the sticky trail of blood lining her upper lip again. She wasn`t stupid enough to fall for this social worker bullshit. Lots of people had said they wanted to help her since she was brought from Mindoir to meet the rest of the galaxy. She had believed them at first, thinking that the rest of existence was as pure and chaste as the colony she had spent her entire life on. She had learned that it was not, and the lessons had been vicious, brutal and scarring. _

_His blow took her by surprise, choking her mocking laughter in her throat and whipping her face to the side. Unbalanced she wobbled on the edge of her seat and then she fell after a moment of cart wheeling arms and soft swearing. He swept the table to the side, so violently that it crashed against the wall. _

_"Hey, you can`t just hit me like that Johnny-law!" She shouted, holding her now burning cheek with one hand. "I know my rights. Whatever you`ve got on me just went right out the fucking window. I want to talk to my lawyer."_

_He bent down and hit her again, and this time it vibrated through her bones into the fire of her already broken nose, making her swear violently. The renewed flood of blood filled her mouth as she struggled to stand, reminding her of the circumstances of their first meeting in the most vivid and gruesome way possible. He pulled her to her feet and hit her twice more, so hard that she fell back, her hip striking the concrete floor so hard her entire leg went numb. She glared up at him, refusing to acknowledge the pain but knowing better than to fight back. She would not be able to do anything to him here, where she was a skinny teenaged bum and he was a captain of the great Alliance. Her revenge would come through tearful interviews and pictures of her bruises released to aggressive media. She knew how to play this game. _

_Not wanting to come off as a pussy however, she spat a mouthful of bloody phlegm on his polished black leather shoes. She expected him to kick her. He didn`t._

_"Look at yourself, Shepard." He said, and he used it this time as though it was her real name. "You`re pathetic. Stealing from liquor stores and mewling for an advocate the minute someone stronger than you shows up. Is this what you want? To be the only brilliant petty criminal in the Skyllian Verge? To waste your talent fencing drugs, or sell your body when you give up on life?"_

_"I'm not a hooker, asshole." She replied._

_"Keep doing what you're doing and you will be, if you're lucky enough to stay alive a few more years. Your medical records show repeated rapes, broken bones, bruises and ligature marks that suggest restraint, torture and frequent beatings. Same as most homeless kids out here. In this kind of jungle, there is always going to be someone bigger and badder than you. And they will always be more than happy to take advantage of that." He fixed her with intense brown eyes. "I've reviewed your aptitude tests. If things had worked out a little differently the Alliance would be begging you to let them pay for you to go to Command School. You'd be on your way to becoming an N7 already."_

_"Well things didn't work out a little differently." She shot back, standing up and retreating a few steps away from him. If he made another move to hit her, she'd be ready for him. She could already feel her face swelling up from his various attacks. "Boohoo. I can't change what happened. I can't change what I am."_

_"You can't change what happened, but you can change what will. Go to Command School. Leave this behind, and no one will be able to take advantage of you. Apply yourself to something other than fucking around with idiots who are too stupid to realize how smart you are and when you come back it won't matter how much bigger than you they are." She had thought he was joking for much longer than she probably should have, but when he handed her the datapad, complete with an ENROLL NOW icon blinking in the corner, she knew that he was serious._

_"Fuck." She swore in her outright disbelief. Whatever reason she had thought her might have for coming into this room... "You guys must be desperate for cannon fodder. What about my criminal record? I might not have gone to jail yet, but there's enough in there to keep me out of any kind of government job."_

_"Joining the military automatically pardons you of any non-felony crime, provided you serve your minimum four year term." He countered effortlessly. "And we don't train cannon fodder at Command School. You'll do four years of immersive training there and graduate as an officer. We train leaders. Marines." _

_She glared at the note of pride in his voice. "How am I going to get there from here? I can't afford a place to sleep at night, let alone an interstellar craft ticket. How am I going to pay for Command School even if I could get there? That shit is expensive," she tapped at the pad and it brought up the exact amount, "10,000 credits a year! I don't have any formal education, and I don't handle authority figures well. What the FUCK are you even thinking?"_

_"I'll take you myself. As for the expense of the education, there are several programs in place to help high-potential subjects from poor backgrounds succeed. I've already signed you up for several of them, they should take care of everything from the moment you get accepted. All else failing, you can always apply for a sponsor. Command School also runs a high school aptitude program alongside the advanced curriculum, after all your Command classes of course. So you'll be busy, but everything should take care of itself if you work hard. I doubt much of it will even challenge you. Like I said," he held up her folder in one hand, "I reviewed your aptitude tests. You'll do fine."_

_She stared at him, open mouthed and struck dumb for a long moment. Then, finally, she asked the only question she had left. _

_"Why are you doing this?" _

_"I kept my eye on you, after Mindoir. From a distance. Even when you ran away from the orphanage and disappeared I kept putting feelers out, monitoring the system, trying to find you before you were recycled through the system and cut loose again. You... haunted me. I read about your colony, the sort of life they led before the attack. I don't imagine you'd ever seen a gun before that day, but you killed two fully combat capable Batarians. Luck? Maybe. But I didn't think so then, and I don't think so now. You've got something, Shepard, something that almost every one of our current force lacks. That spark that makes you capable of doing things that should be impossible. Humanity needs you." He folded his arms behind his back. "So I'm going to try and make sure you do what's right. But I can't force you, the choice is yours and it always will be. Even after you get to Jump Zero, at anytime during the program you can walk away with no repercussions and no debt from the training you did recieve. But once you get there, you won't want to."_

_He turned and headed to the door as she stared down at the datapad in her hands, that flashed images of proud soldiers in their full armour, each one wearing the N7 engraving like a medal of honour. _

_"The SSV Arjuna leaves tomorrow at fourteen hundred hours. If you want to be somebody, you'll be on board. If not," he shrugged, "there are junkies waiting for their fix of red sand." After he was gone she sat alone for a long time, scanning pages and pages of stories and information, all designed to make her want to be a Commander. _

_When she arrived at the ship she tossed the datapad onto his desk and made a face._

_"Fine, you convinced me. But you should have someone revise your fucking pamphlets. They make you guys look like a bunch of self-righteous assholes." He smiled at her for the first time, and despite all her efforts to be contrary she smiled back._

"Miss Shepard? Miss Shepard?" The high, nasal voice of her salarian lawyer broke the haze of memory and she looked up from the datapad that held the various forms she was supposed to be filling out. She was not making very good progress, it seemed.

"You looked far away, Miss Shepard. Are you finished with the B4's? I still need your signature and retinal confirmation scans on the E19 forms so we can sue to retain your ownership of life insurance payout. If you really died, than you are entitled to keep that money." Mollan Rhobe had the same lightning quick way of talking that characterized many salarians. At one point it might have irritated her, the way he seemed to rush through everything as quickly as possible but after a few months of Mordin he seemed positively sluggish by comparison. She yawned and shook her head.

"I've still got six pages to go. Maybe we can pick this up tomorrow?" The salarian sighed. She supposed she must seem very slow to him. She seemed slow to herself, at the moment. Fading off into memories when she was supposed to be working. It was out of character, and it irritated her enough to get her up and out of the seat, stretching her stiff legs. "Hey, every moment I waste is another moment you get paid for being pretty."

"Being pretty has nothing to do with anything." Mollan replied, disapprovingly. But her point seemed to have relaxed him and he was humming as he gathered up her various datapads full of forms and began storing them away in one of the unmarked safeboxes installed along the left wall. She had no idea how he kept the dozens of identical containers straight, since he seemed to put her paperwork in a different one every time. She supposed that was the point, and one of the many reasons he came so highly recommended.

Tapping at her omnitool she sent Thane a short message. "Still hungry? Meet me at the Tandoori Palace," and the promised directions to the tiny restaurant that lay sandwiched between more impressive places on one of the cleaner and less unfriendly levels of the Wards. She had never eaten there before, but everyone who reviewed it had nothing but good things to say about it. His response came a moment later.

"Race you."

Immediately, she broke into a dead run, clearing people out her way with little more than a defiant glare. When people who recognized her, an uncomfortably large section of the population despite her attempt to be inconspicuous by cutting and dyeing her black hair blond, she held up a hand to silence their questions. She was Shepard. She was on an important mission. Everyone out of the way. The crowd parted before her like the red sea and she charged on, cutting through alleys and over fences when she needed a shortcut.

Rounding the corner she saw the restaurant, a handholding couple just disappearing between its swinging glass doors. And a familiar, leather clad back that was making its calm, confident way toward them. She skirted back, allowing herself to melt into the shadows and tailed him, wondering how to get in front before he saw her. Thane was too observant to let her dash ahead, even if she kept in darkness. She pursed her lips as he drew ever nearer and sighed. There was nothing to be done. Tucking her head down she slid forward, quick and silent. When he finally heard her and started to turn it was too late. She let out a burst of speed, abandoning subtlety and crashed into him, her shoulder connecting just under his arm as he half-turned toward her, her momentum knocking him off his feet with a startled gasp. She was expecting everything, the shift of his weight as he started to fall, the way his arm clawed at her back, trying to drag her down with him and she neatly sidestepped from under his grip, turning and making a run for the door before he could recover.

Not fast enough it seemed. His hand snaked out faster than she thought possible and caught her ankle. She tripped, going down on her knees and he pulled her back, pushing himself up with the same motion to try and get past her. She caught his jacket with one hand, his arm with the other, and with a wrenching motion pulled him off balance again. He stayed up and she wound her arm around his waist so she could try again. She was still attempting to pull him down to the floor when he surged ahead, making for the door of the restaurant again. He was stronger than he looked, apparently, and he had always looked plenty strong. Shepard felt herself dragged along behind him, her legs kicking ineffectually. There was no way to get any traction on the smooth metal floors. She wrapped her other arm around his waist and tried again trying to plant her feet, only to have her shoes slip out from under her as he pulled them both finally through the door.

They were laughing as she loosened her grip and dropped to the floor, Thane sounding somewhat breathless. She had never heard him laugh out loud, beyond a few quiet chuckles that he always seemed to muffle into his hand. The hostess was giving them odd looks, as Thane extended one hand and helped her up off the floor.

"I did not expect you to get quite so... competitive." Thane commented as Shepard dusted off the seat of her pants and motioned for a table for two. "I admit, your tackle took me by surprise."

"I hate losing. At anything." Shepard replied as they followed the thin girl to a booth in the corner. She gave them menus and opened her mouth as if to say something. After a moment she closed it and left without a word. Shepard laughed as she scanned the various rows of savory dishes, each one sounding so familiar. "I think we scared the help."

"You scare everyone." Thane replied, with a smirk. He looked down at his own menu and his eyes narrowed slightly before he looked back up to her. "Ah, I think you may have to explain some of this to me. What exactly is curry?" He looked down again. "And lentils? And... why don't you just order for both of us?" He put the thing down and she nodded, grinning.

The waitress arrived to take their order, looking more relaxed now at least, and Shepard scanned the menu, her tongue twisting around the elaborate traditional names with ease. The waitress smiled and nodded as she finished with a pot of chai tea and scooped up their menu's before beating a hasty retreat. Perhaps not as relaxed as she looked, then. Shepard frowned, looking back at Thane.

"Am I really that scary?" She asked. A glance in the wall length mirror revealed nothing especially foreboding about her. Well the cybernetic eyes were a little off-putting she supposed. They made her look like there were two sparks of fire burning deep in her eyes. When the light changed she could always feel their lenses twisting and adjusting themselves. Even though her vision was actually better now, sharper and clearer with almost perfect depth perception and much more advanced night vision, it made her skin prickle, to feel something alien moving so deep inside her.

"Anyone who is not very stupid or very arrogant is afraid of you, Shepard." Thane replied. "Or perhaps they are not so much afraid as... cautious. You are a powerful woman, and you wear that in every movement you make, every look you give. It is difficult to miss."

She turned to look at him, abandoning the scrutiny of her robotic eyes and the lenses whirred inside her, fixing on his face. He sat with his back to the window, his dark eyes focused on her. She usually hated it when people looked at her with that kind of intensity, it made her uncomfortable. But with Thane there was less of the invasive prying she felt with others, he was just a naturally attentive person. She thought that was what it was at least.

"They?" She asked, raising one eyebrow. He raised one of his own scaly brows back as though unsure of what she was asking. "You said 'they are not so much afraid as cautious'. Does that mean you're not afraid of me? Are you then very stupid or very arrogant?"

He smiled at her. "I'm not afraid of you because we're friends, Shepard. I would think that means I don't have to worry about you smashing my face in on a whim."

"I don't smash faces on whims. I only do it when I'm out of bullets and have a very good reason to." Shepard protested. She was beginning to hate this conversation, she was getting so defensive. But Thane's words had struck a nerve, as had the reaction of the waitress. It reminded her of another time in her life when people had reacted to her with fear every time she fixed their eyes on her. When humans had looked at her like they might an alien. "I am NOT scary. I smile at everyone. I'm very polite."

"You do. You are." Thane concurred in his quiet voice. "When you are not swearing at everyone, at least. But the world tends to explode around you, Shepard. It's put you on edge, and that makes people uncomfortable as much as anything else. The fact you always look like you're about to take something by the throat and throttle it for the good of everyone. People just don't want to get in your way. But I am not in your way. And therefore, I need fear nothing."

She stared at him for a moment and then sighed, as if dismissing the topic. It was better just not to say anything at all at times like this, when she wasn't sure whether she was angry or why. She really had no reason to be, everything he said was true. It just bothered her that he, and apparently the rest of the world saw it so easily.

"Is something bothering you, Shepard?" He asked. She looked back at him, the same only slightly narrowed eyes focused entirely on her, the same look of calm serenity on his face. Sometimes she felt like he was staring straight into her soul, seeing things he had no right to. If she wanted to share them, she would.

"Yes." She said, even though she meant to say no. "I mean no. Well... kind of. I mean. It's stupid. Forget it."

Smooth, Shepard. Very smooth.

"If you wish me to, I shall. But you've looked... concerned, as of late. Your thoughts wander." He paused as the waitress bought them their tea, craning his neck instinctually away from the clouds of dewy steam that escaped the pots spout. She tilted the pot away so the steam would drift toward herself as she thought. Thane knew her far too well for someone who she had known for so short a time. That was annoying, but she supposed she knew him just as well. They were friends. Maybe it was really this easy; she could just talk about what was bothering her with a friend and not have it mean anything more. She was not showing weakness in the face of a subordinate or breaching protocol. She was being... normal.

"I've been having weird dreams." She said finally. "Like... memories. At first they were just snapshots, nothing important. Days at the Combat School I remember, moments from the first Normandy that were special. Not in the galaxy-saving sense, just things I remember because they were important to me at the time. Little stuff. Then... not so little."

"Mindoir?" He guessed keenly. She narrowed her eyes at him. This was getting ridiculous. How did he know all this stuff that was going on inside her own head? He shrugged under her piercing gaze.

"Your history is hardly a well kept secret. The only person not kidnapped or murdered by Batarian slavers becoming the Savior of the Citadel is the kind of story people love to talk about. News of your exploits reached even me, when every news station was screaming hysterically about it in the days after you defeated Sovereign." He paused. "I understand you were quite young when it happened."

"Yeah." Shepard replied hesitantly. "I mean, yes I was young but I'm not... it's..." She paused, frustrated with her own inability to vocalize what she was feeling.

"I know the Alliance did everything they could. We were outside of their jurisdiction at the time, so really they didn't have to do anything at all. And I KNOW that thinking about it all the time isn't going to do anyone any goddamn good, least of all me. Nothing I can do will change what happened there, no one knows which group it was that attacked and no one ever found the ringleaders. I can't bring anyone to any kind of justice, I accept that. I put all this behind me, years ago. When it comes to that part of my life... it's in its proper place. Mindoir is not bothering me, these stupid DREAMS about Mindoir are."

Thane had been silent through her entire rant, but he remained attentive, watching her face. She bit her lip and sipped at her tea, the heavy flavor of vanilla and spices rolling across her tongue. "And it's not just Mindoir. I've been thinking more and more about the crucial turning points in my life, the things that happened and choices I made that led me here and made me who I am. It's... weird. I've never been the kind of person to dwell in the past."

"You sound like you're developing your own kind of solipism." Thane commented softly, trying his own tea, which he evidently enjoyed. He set the cup down and laced his fingers together, continuing his constant study of her. "I find the mannerisms of humans most difficult to discern, but you seem to be very tense about this. Perhaps there is something deeper at play here."

"Humans are hard to read? I didn't think we had anything on drell. Your faces hardly move at all." She commented. She thought from the way that Thane guessed at everything so easily he was reading her like a book. Maybe he was just getting all his information from listening to her. That would be a first, most people seemed to ignore half the things you said to them.

"Perhaps that is the root of the problem. Your faces are so expressive; it is almost like a cartoon sometimes, with such extreme displays of emotion passing so quickly. The details escape me. It is the difference between a gentle breeze and a hurricane between our kinds. But some mannerisms are universal. Like, say, trying to change the subject in the middle of a conversation." He looked amused, she stuck her tongue out at him.

"I don't have anything interesting to say about it. Stuff happened, it was hard, but I'm here now so I don't suppose it matters. I don't let it bother me, because I have more important things to worry about." She crossed her arms across her chest. "I can't afford to get distracted right now. I can't afford to day dream."

Thane shook his head. "There is still another week until the Normandy repairs are finished. In that time, you may be as distracted as you wish, Shepard. You'll put it all behind you when the time comes, but for now you shouldn't be afraid to realize your feelings are not as simple as you thought."

"What if they are?" She countered stubbornly.

"Shepard, feelings are never simple. There's no weakness in that." He sipped his tea again, smiling at the taste or at her she didn't know. "What did you call this again?"

And just like that, their serious conversation was over. She smiled at him, just as their food arrived, and most of the rest of the meal was spent explaining what was what as he tried everything and liked most of it. Just as it was nice to have him approach the topic, it was nice that he knew when to back off. They argued about who was going to pay the bill until she let him win by saying she had to go to the bathroom and met him outside the restaurant, just as the light flickered on her omnitool saying that Anderson wanted to see her. As soon as possible.

"Thanks for dinner, Thane. And the conversation." She hesitated, torn between what was appropriate and what was expected. That had not been a date. It had not felt like a date, while they were actually doing it. So why did she feel like a nervous kid after the first awkward, unfunny movie date, standing outside of the theatre wondering if they were supposed to kiss yet or if it was slutty to use tongue this early? She settled for a hand lightly on his sleeve. Neutral. Friendly. Non-threatening. That was her. "It helped."

"Then it was my pleasure. Enjoy your time with the Councillor." He replied, resting his hand on her arm in a similar fashion. As she turned to walk away he felt his hand slide down her arm rather than dropping away, brushing the back of her hand in a way that made her skin tingle in a most disconcerting way. When she glanced over her shoulder at him, he was already walking away, his back to her. She did not have a chance to catch a glimpse of his face, though she doubted she would have been able to guess what he was thinking even if she had. She ran her fingers over the place on the back of her hand, feeling the ghost of his fingers still there.

Shaking her head, she turned toward a Rapid Transit post. Thane was right. Feelings were never simple.


	3. 3

_There is no atmosphere on Torfan, the moon is too small to support one. Her breath escaped as a half-synthetic gasp as she pulled back under the rocky outcropping they had been using as cover. Her gun was useless, red hot and sizzling, small plumes of steam rising off the superheated metal and she threw it to the side, scooping up the pistol dropped by the nearest marine, face down in the stony earth. He had no objections. The last survivor of the batarian squad crept over, expecting her to be helpless against him. She rolled out of cover, low to the ground, his surprised shot flying too far to the left; she heard it twang ineffectually into the soil a few feet over. She unloaded six shots into his chest. He went down, choking and gasping, strange blood leaking from his new holes. She shot him once more, in the head. He went quiet, restoring the serene lifelessness of the moon. She growled in her chest and holstered her new weapon. Not done yet._

_"Jesus FUCK." Corporal Bine sagged out from behind the stone column she had been using for cover. The opposite side was blasted to chunks, pieces of it still crumbling off as she braced her hands against her knees. From various other positions around her, the remnants of her squad appeared, fixing the battlefield with wide eyes. They were not expecting a force of such size so early in their assault. Shepard swore, reaching up to rub her aching nose. It always aches when she is under stress, but her hand bumped the glass of her visor, reminding her where she was, what she was doing. "We can't go into that. There has to be a thousand of them. Our intelligence was off."_

_"Radio for back up." Shepard ordered. The corporal obeyed without question. Commander Flyn was dead, his brains leaking out the back of his helmet three feet away. Shepard was suddenly the commanding officer of their assault, by right and by simple reality. They would not have followed anyone else, not after that._

_"Negative. They can't risk bringing a drop ship down while those defense towers are operational." Bines reported after a bought whispering into the radio and then one composed mostly of heavy swearing. "SHIT!"_

_"We're not out yet." Shepard replied, steeling herself. "We can fight our way into the place, make a hard push for the control room, then bunker down there in a strategic position and wait until they're in position. There are a hundred marines waiting in orbit, no way can they take us all."_

_"What if there isn't a strategic position once we get inside?" Rushes asked, his young voice peaking unpleasantly. She sighed, cradling the visor of her helmet in one gloved hands. She always hated Rushes, thought him to be a coward. The tone of his voice did nothing to improve his standing._

_"Then I guess we all die, the same as we all die if we wait out here for backup that isn't coming." She rasped, putting her hands on her hips. "We got fucked, my friends, and if we survive this I promise everyone who was instrumental in passing us this bogus intelligence will feel my boot so far up their ass that every time they pick their nose I'll feel it in my little toe. But we're soldiers, not just soldiers but marines. This is what we do, and taking out those towers is our only chance at a way out of this pisshole." She looked around at the solemn faces. Only six. Six marines and a base full of god knew how many angry batarians out for blood. _

_If she remembered how to pray, she might have done it then. But she did not, so she just nodded to them all and pulled out her gun. They followed suit._

_"Right behind you, lieutenant." Corporal Bines said solemnly. They were the last words Shepard ever heard her say._

_The fight in went well. They had trained in assault tactics against places like this before, batarians loving their wide corners and narrow doorways. They were riding high on the victory when they burst into the tower command, Rushes and Godfrey blasting away the two engineers as they were propelled suddenly upward by a wave of Bines' powerful biotics. Shepard commanded Forlorn and Hughes to hold the door and made her way to the control panels, tugging off her gloves so her dexterous fingers could move nimbly over the keyboard tapping at it for a few seconds before she swore viciously and kicked the console hard enough to dent it, her reinforced boots smashing steel like it was cardboard._

_"What is it?" Godfrey asked, coming up beside her. His piercing blue eyes, the most remarkable thing about his otherwise everyday face, scanned over her shoulder and he swore himself a moment later and stomped across the room, his hand pressed over the visor of his helmet. Shepard leaned forward, continuing to search desperately for some sort of override, some break in their firewalls that would give her a hacking entrance. No such luck. Goddamn the batarians for being so good at their jobs._

_"Jesus, what's the matter?" Rushes called, from where he was giving Forlorn and Hughes assistance maintaining their suppressive fire. Bines released blasts of blue fire through gaps in the shooting, eliciting screams from their attackers as raw energy tore them apart. They were going strong, but soon they would have to switch to stims. Whenever that happened the clock really started ticking down, kidney failure and brain aneurisms becoming more and more likely, along with the potential for mistakes and carelessness. _

_"They knew what we were trying to do. They've locked the systems individually. Someone has to climb up to each tower and disable the guns from there. It shouldn't take very much time, but cover is scarce. We need someone with quick hands and a sniper rifle to even hope for a shot at it." She scanned her available team and pointed at Forlorn._

_"You. Through this hatch. Godfrey, you replace Forlorn. Keep them out of this room, no matter what. I'll stay at the mouth of the hatch and try to cover him while he disables the guns." She tossed Godfrey her grenade pouch and he caught it without a word, positioning himself with his assault rifle out. Such a good soldier, she thought. She liked all of them, really. Except Rushes._

_As she poked her head out of the hatch, Forlorn's boots pounding above her as he scurried up, she took a moment to scan the area for the first sign of hostiles. She knew where they would be coming from, if they were smart, where they could get a good shot at Forlorn without him being able to position his rifle and shoot back. She also knew where they would be coming from if they were not so smart, and a moment later that door slid open. She laid her arms flat against the steel lip of the hatch, only her head and gun poking up high enough to see and lined her shots with liquid clarity. They started dropping, Forlorn helping from his position straddling the tower console above._

_"Leave them to me." She screamed into the radio as a batarian's head exploded in a maelstrom of gore, soaking his companion. As the other alien reeled back, wiping at the gore obscuring his vision she lined up another shot, killing him. There was a lull in the battle, the air suddenly so still it was deafening. She could hear the blood roaring in her ears, down into her chest, the frantic beating of her heart. She glanced up and Forlorn looked like nothing more than a target hovering in space. A moment later and he was on his way back down. Shepard turned as Forlorn hit the ground and took off running to the next tower. _

_The world was a panicked blur, a blood haze all around her. She took a shot in the shoulder and felt the material suddenly squeeze tight around her to seal off a tear in the suit. She activated her barrier, the blue energy bathing her in iridescent light as she leaned up and killed three batarians that were trying to snipe Forlorn off the second tower as he worked feverishly. She watched the lights go off, hoisting herself further out of the hatch to try and get a better shot at the hostiles still pouring out of the door. They were coming from two directions now and Shepard sent a ball of blue energy flying, knocking a squad backwards into each other as they tried to file through a narrow doorway. Forlorn picked them off with surgical precision before beginning his second descent and Shepard turned again, leaning far to the side. Her arms were getting tired, and a flick of her wrist activated an adrenal stim to compensate. The clock was ticking. There was no going back after the first. She would not be able to fight without them until she had a good ten hours of sleep and at least two recovery days. For the moment though, her resolve sharpened, the world becoming suddenly cleaner, clearer, brutal in its intensity. Her heart rate increased, blasting in her chest so hard she could feel it rock the rest of her body. _

_"Jesus, how many are there?" She heard Forlorn mutter into his radio as he sprinted along the narrow track to the third and final tower. She laughed, a bark of battle mayhem from human lips. Thought was beyond her now, this was pure chemical and instinct. Still, she kept her head on, like a commanding officer should. _

_"Not enough. One more to go, soldier, and I'm buying the drinks when we haul ourselves off this rock."_

_"Aye, aye." He replied, beginning his climb. From below there came an explosion that made Shepard's boots slip on the spokes of the ladder where she had braced herself. Suddenly, Rushe's voice crackled over the radio._

_"Godfrey's dead, Shepard! We're keeping them back pretty good now. It's hard for them to get in over... over the bodies." He sounded like he might cry and Shepard, in her red haze, wanted to slap him, scream at him. Godfrey was dead and Rushes was alive, where was the justice in that?_

_"Hold your position, we're almost done up here." She snapped, throwing her biotics across the compound at the newest emerging batarians. From the way they were coming, cautious and slow, ducking behind cover it was obvious that they were finally figuring out that they could not expect to kill marines as easily as they did colonists in the Blitz. The blast was diluted by the time it reached him, doing little but shove him back into the wall. It was all she needed though, as she leapt from the hatch, punching bullet holes in his armour. He sagged back, unbalancing his friend. Shepard took him out as well before she had to dive behind cover to save her own skin. The hatch had kept her out of sight, made her a tiny, deadly speck on the battle field. Up above, she was vulnerable._

_"Lieutenant, they've got a new wave. Bines is dead. We need you down here!" Rushes' voice crackled back over the radio, piercing her battle lust. _

_"Goddamn it I said hold your position! Forlorn is almost done!" Shepard replied, as bullets exploded against the opposite side of her cover, punching out dents against her back._

_"I think you'd better head back in there, lieutenant." For/lorn's voice was the epitome of control, even and level as the final tower went off line. He did not bother trying to get back down, just pulled out his sniper rifle and curled up, trying to make himself the smallest target possible. Beneath him, the batarians started going down one by one. But they were still coming, pouring out of every hole like rats. She shot one that strayed into her sight, trying to get a shot at her while she sought refuge from his fellows. The glass of his helmet exploded and her fell backwards, grasping vainly at the shards and shrieking. _

_"What? No, just get down here and we'll go in together. We'll have a better chance with both of us anyway." Shepard replied. She leaned around to shoot and noticed blood on her arm. The tear in her suit was not just that it seemed, thick crimson lines soaking the creases and divots of her armour. _

_"We can't hold another minute lieutenant! They're making a push for the door!" Rushes cried, before his radio suddenly went dead. Shepard swore, turning to the hatch and diving down it, bullets shrieking overhead and she vanished. She pulled the door closed after her; spinning the heavy iron bar that activated the thick clamps and the pressure seal. She could not afford to leave a back door open for the batarians to exploit. Not even to save Forlorn. _

_Dropping from the ceiling she shot the batarian who had managed to get his foot in the door in the face. Red washed over her vision, tainting the world the color of blood. There was blood everywhere, running down the walls, rushing down the drain installed in the centre of the floor, a turgid river that filled her mind with its reek of copper and bile. She ran forward, flat out, muzzle flashes exploding in the dim light. Men died before her in waves. _

_Smashing into the wall of batarian attackers probably should have killed her. One of them slammed into her wrist, wrenching it against the wall. The world exploded as stims flooded her system and she roared, grabbing his helmet, under the lip and tearing it off in one motion. He started to choke immediately, grasping at his throat and she stabbed her fingers into his eyeballs, hooking her hand into his face with a grip like a steel vice. He shrieked and sobbed and slapped ineffectually at her wrist as she twisted his body in front of her, letting him soak bullets as he choked to death. When he began to sag, her fingers tearing through the delicate flesh she had used to manipulate him she raised one foot and kicked the corpse in the chest, sending him sailing back a few feet to crash into the man behind him. She shot him and both bodies sagged back into the third as he tried desperately to back pedal down the narrow hall. She shot him to, in the back of the head. _

_Warp tore apart her next attacker and she emerged into an empty hallway, looking both ways. She glanced behind her to see Rushes and Hughes, both of them looking worse for wear, Hughes limping._

_"Back up is coming. They want us to bunker down here and wait for them." Hughes gasped, holding the tear in his armour where blood was beginning to trickle down. He swore hard, as Shepard tapped her radio, trying to contact Forlorn. No answer. She dropped her hand, the heat of rage like frothing in her blood. "We can seal the doors, so they won't be able to touch us. They can't have too many people left, we've killed dozens. More than a hundred."_

_She whipped around, shaking her head. There was no way she could let this stand. Batarians, thinking they could do whatever they wanted, take whoever they wanted, and then hide behind the pacifism of the Council and the tangled, fractured Alliance judicial systems. Not good enough. The price for what had happened to them, to Forlorn and Godfrey and Bines, was blood. _

_"No." She said. "Fall in." _

_They did, and she set a hard pace, chasing their fleeing attackers through their own base. _

"Shepard." Councilor Anderson's voice stirred her from memory, which annoyed her more because she had been too engrossed in it to hear him enter the room. She turned in her chair with a smile already half formed on her lips, only to have it die abruptly when she saw who was with him. Udina.

"Councillor." She greeted him with a nod instead. "Udina." She greeted him with a look that could wilt a cactus.

"Shepard, I don't appreciate that look." Udina chimed in immediately, the nest of crow's feet at the corners of his eyes contracting as he squinted at her. She glared right back, feeling something inside her bristle under his scrutiny. They held that look for a long moment, before the councilor cleared his throat loudly and took his seat behind the desk. They broke it only when he did it again, the noticeably artificial noise finally making Shepard's eyes flicker away from her arch rival in the dense web of Citadel politics.

"I'm glad you're here, Shepard. And that your dealings with Cerberus have ended. " Anderson said, withdrawing a bottle from the bottom drawer of his desk, along with a pair of glasses. The number did not go unnoticed by anyone in the room, and Shepard smiled sweetly at the sour old politician as he bristled. It seemed that some things never changed, no matter what. Still always at odds. "I was saving this for a special occasion, earthmade three hundred year old scotch. We could wait until your readmitted into the Alliance and promoted, but now seems as good a time as ever."

Shepard nodded. "Especially since I won't be rejoining the Alliance." She said as he filled the glasses.

That stopped him, his hand wavering so noticeably that he spilled a little. Even Udina had nothing to say, standing stock still on her left with his mouth just slightly open. For a long moment the silence filled the room as she looked between the two of them. She could not have cared less what Udina thought or did, but the look of betrayal in Anderson's eyes cut her to the bone. "I don't know how you could have thought I would."

"What do you mean?" Anderson asked. "You were... you've... you're a SOLDIER, Shepard. You belong in the Alliance. It's..." He paused slightly, as though unsure of how exactly to say exactly what the Alliance meant to her. At one point she would have understood, the Alliance had been her entire life, her calling, her purpose. But dying changed a lot of things, in ways that no one could predict.

"It was my whole life, Anderson, that's the thing. I gave the Alliance the whole of my existence the day I turned sixteen and when I died the first thing they did was use my likeness for their anti-alien politics following the attack, and then smear my name every chance they got after that. They called me delusional, unstable, crazy. They called me CRAZY." She relaxed slightly, sensing that her emotions were ranging to places she did not want them to go. It had not been Anderson's fault, he had always believed her. "Besides, they'd want me to replace my crew with Alliance people. That isn't an option."

"Are those aliens really so valuable?" Udina snarled. "Do you love them enough to turn your back on the rest of humanity for them?"

"I wasn't aware that the Alliance represented all humankind. Especially when you did jack shit to rescue all those colonies that went missing. Remember them, Udina? Tens of thousands of dead? Ring any bells?" She turned away from him, fixing her gaze back on Anderson. "And it's not just the non-humans. The engineers, the flight crew, the fucking janitor, every person on that ship went to hell and back with me. I won't turn my back on them, not for anything."

Anderson sighed heavily, and then filled the other glass anyway. "I was hoping it would be just like old times, Shepard. You out there, fighting the good fight, while I look on in pride. But I guess that's too simple a thing to ask for."

"It's not all bad. I'm still a Spectre, and I'll still be working with the Alliance as much as I can. But I can't be held back, I can't afford to follow rules. The Reapers aren't going to wait for bureaucracy or consensus; I need to get things done my way, at my pace." She took the other glass from him as they both stood. "And you know, I'm always fighting the good fight."

"Here's to that, I suppose." He said, raising his glass in a toast. They clinked glasses and drank, pointedly ignoring their fuming company. As they set down their glasses, the alcohol burning warmly through her stomach Anderson rubbed the back of his neck and looked up.

"Now. About your Spectre status..." He began. Shepard swore immediately, slumping back in the chair. She knew that voice. The tired, frustrated tone he used whenever he was talking about her relationship with the rest of the Council.

"What now? Do they not like my new haircut?" She asked bitterly, crossing her arms across her chest. Anderson laughed briefly and shook his head. "I guess they want me to stop talking about the Reapers then. Even after all the new evidence I brought, all that data from the Collector base. Goddamn, why do I even try?"

"You've got one of them on your side." Anderson supplied helpfully, meaning the salarian councilor. "Even Lurana is less sure that there's not some sort of outside threat you've tapped into. It's the turian. He never wanted you with the Spectre's or us on the Council. This is just a continuation of his pattern."

"But this time his pride could mean the life of every sentient thing in the galaxy, not a nut-shot for the Alliance." Shepard replied, running her fingers through her hair and pressing the heels of her hands over her eyes. "I'm guessing it's because of him that you needed to see me?"

"Indeed. He wants to run a few psychological evaluations on you. Make sure that you're thinking clearly. It will take the wind out of his sails if you pass them all with flying colors, as I know you will." Anderson paused as she looked up, her suddenly tired eyes searching his with only a hint of disbelief.

"You actually want me to take them?" She asked.

"Look at it rationally, Shepard." Udina interrupted. "If you refuse you look even more like the paranoid conspiracy theorist he's making you out to be. If you take them and pass all his claims suddenly become hollow, your legitimacy goes up a notch with all the Councilors. It's a matter of perception at this point. Since you aren't really crazy." He did not sound as convinced of that as Anderson did and she snorted at his tone, rubbing at her gathering tension, feeling her muscles tying themselves into knots at the base of her neck.

"If you ask me to take a psych test, Councillor, I will." She said finally. Anderson nodded.

"I'll tell them you're ready for them." He said, reaching for the communications console on his desk.

Later, as she made her way back to the ship, she could not help but wish she had stolen the rest of that bottle of brandy. Not only had it been delicious, and the best thing about her evening after parting ways with Thane, she could really use the sweet oblivion its amber depths had promised her. She could really use a shower, a hard fuck and a dreamless sleep, all told. Unfortunately, only one of those seemed to be within her grasp.

"Hey Commander." Joker greeted her as she left the airlock, her skin buzzing and itchy from the decontamination ray. He was constantly running system and body diagnostics as the ship was repaired, meticulously going over every available inch to make sure the Normandy was returned to her former perfection by the time they left port. "How was talks with the Council?"

"I wasn't talking to the Council." Shepard shot back, her voice rising just a little bit in her frustration. "I was trying to convince a snaggle-toothed idiot that I'm not ass-over-tea-kettle insane while he stood there constantly denying mountains of evidence to launch personal attacks." She leaned against the wall that separated the cockpit from the long hallway down toward the galaxy map as she spoke, closing her eyes against the glare of the overhead light.

"Ah. Well, that's politics for you. Don't let it get to you, Commander. You're a hero. Again. You saved the galaxy. Again. No one can stop you, if you put your mind to it. Again." He turned his seat back to survey the glowing orange screens and their mountains of complex numbers and three-dimensional diagrams. "Try not to fuck everything up and die this time."

"Thanks for the pep-talk." She replied, pulling herself to her feet again and making her way toward the elevator.

"Go see your boyfriend if you want a pep-talk." Joker tossed the comment over his shoulder in a decidedly flippant manner, but it froze Shepard in her steps. She turned around slowly, her eyes narrowed.

"Care to explain that little comment, Mr. Moreau?" She asked, her voice pitched dangerously low. She normally only spoke like that to people she was about to kill. Joker glanced over his shoulder at her.

"Not with you looking at me like that, Commander." He tried. When her expression only darkened he flinched, holding up two hands defensively. "Alright, alright. It's just crew gossip but people are saying that you and Krios are getting... familiar. And, you know, there was a huge news story today about how Commander Shepard was seen on a date with a drell." He laughed at the astonished look on her face. "Al-Jilani REALLY hates you, Commander. I guess you shouldn't have punched her in the face, that first time."

"She deserved it." Shepard replied, crossing her arms over her chest.

"No arguements here." The pilot replied.

"And Thane isn't my boyfriend or... or anything. We're just friends."

"Whatever you say, Commander." She turned to leave again, her brain boiling with angry thoughts. Bad memories, politics, smear campaigns... it was all so complicated suddenly. They hadn't gone over anything like this in Command School, for all their boasting that they would know everything anyone needed to know once they were done there. Shepard was learning to distrust any organization with a reputation. The Alliance had used her and cast her aside in more ways than one, the Council continued to spit on her and expect her to smile and nod pleasantly in response. Maybe she should have taken Jack's advice and gone pirate while she still had a chance.

Two showers a day was not uncommon for her. Cleanliness was one of the only luxuries she regularly indulged in. As she rubbed sandalwood shampoo into her short curls she thought back to what Joker had said. Ship gossip. She was not unfamiliar with it, having been an XO long enough to know they were the favored subject of conversation whenever they were not around. As the slick foam slid over her various scars, her unnaturally perky breasts and down her long, muscled frame she wondered why this particular rumor annoyed her so much.

Because it was true? Or at least borderline true? She couldn't deny she found Thane attractive, so exotic with his many different shades of skin, his depthless and ever alert black eyes. She trusted him, enough to confide in him and get him to watch her back on the battlefield. Sighing, she turned off the water and stepped out of the stall, facing the lightly misted, full length mirror that hung beside the door. Her own reflection caught her eye, almost making her do a double take. She turned to face her clone, wiping away the steam that obscured the finer details with one hand.

Cerberus had done a decent job of making her appear normal in uniform. Her arms were free of scars and her face might someday be as well, as long as she could keep thinking good thoughts, as the doctor put it. Under the uniform it was a different story. Her body remained a roadmap of pain, the most vivid reminder of her all too recent death.

The lattice of scars that started just under her left armpit and arched down, under the dip of her breast and across the top of her stomach were the most noticeable. Pointed and barbed like winter thorn bushes, they were left by her shattered her ribs wrenching up, through the flesh as she was sucked out of the husk of the dying Normandy 1. Her struggling as she tried to plug the holes in her suit had made things even worse. They descended all the way down to her waist, the last and most vicious ending a finger width away from the divot of her bellybutton. Along her hips there were more scars, these the straight, subtle signs of extensive reconstructive surgery on her hips, broken by debris as she spun through space. There were others, mostly small and inconsequential down her long powerful legs, across her muscular back. They were barely anything, but she knew them all. Remembered the pain of them.

But the worst pain, the worst and most terrifying pain of her life, left no scars. She ran her hands over her chest, feeling the steady expansion and contraction of her lungs under their protective cage of bone, the swell of muscles working in tandem, forcing life-giving oxygen through her body. That had been the worst. Even with her lungs crushed flat in the vacuum, with no air to relieve the agony of her suffocation; her body had tried to breathe. She remembered the feeling of her muscles tearing themselves apart as they tried to force her to draw breath. She remembered her self-destruction, life leaking slowly out of her as stims and medigel pierced her in every direction, trying to save her but just drawing out the pain. When she dropped her hands, coming back to the present, her skin was covered in a fine layer of sweat. She shook her head, shaking the phantom spasms of suffocation out of her body and sighed.

Yeah right. Even if they were not completely different species with hugely varying ideas of what was desirable she could not expect Thane to find her attractive. At least not once she got her clothes off. The pictures she had seen of drell women had never featured anything more scandalous than a kneecap, but the differences were plain enough. Drell women did not have breasts or hair, and their skin was just as intricate and beautifully marked as the men. They had large eyes, all different colors she had learned, not just black. They were also harder, more straight and delicate lines rather than soft hips and curved legs. Thane looked much more like a human male than she looked like a drell female.

Not that it really mattered in the end. She sighed, shaking water from her short hair, and went to get dressed. There on the desk was the real reason it was stupid to even think of things like that. She went to sit down and check her messages, but as usual she just ended up staring at the picture on her desk, her lip finding its way between her teeth where she worried it lightly.

Kaidan. What the fuck was she going to do about Kaidan? His picture remained, but her feelings toward him seemed to slip further and further away. She did not know what she had expected, and the simple blind stupidity of the fact was what hurt more than anything else. She did not know what he could have said that would have made anything right. She hated what he had said, intensely, and she had yet to really forgive him for it. But he really could not have done anything that would have made her happy. Short of leaving his entire family, all his friends, and his life-long career behind to follow her into the suicidal unknown after not seeing her for two years, but if he had done that he would not have been the man she loved. It was not her fault that she had died, it was not her fault that the Alliance would not help her, it was not her fault that she had been forced into working for an organization that disgusted her for a man she did not trust. But none of that had been his fault either. There simply was no right answer.

Just like there was not any way to address the physical ache that was burning within her as her mind wandered back to the night they had spent together before Ilos, wrapped in his warmth, his strength. He had been so tender with her, so gentle, but so passionate at the same time. She had never known sex could be so soft, no hair pulling or screaming or clawing. She had felt herself relax into it for the first time; enjoy it in a way that she never had before. It was the first time she had not faked her climax. Both of them had been real.

Sighing, she stood, feeling a heat building in her core that made her uncomfortable. She put on a combat bra to keep her breasts out of the way and did single-arm pushups until she was so tired she could do nothing but throw herself face down on the bed, on top of the sheets and blankets, mind drawing a blank oblivion that she slipped gratefully into.


	4. 4

_She was born in blood six centimeters deep, her true self sliding forth from a shell crippled by a lifetime of kneeling behind altars and behind desks, squinting at hundreds of prescribed principles and moralities. The clarity of battle revealed them for what they were, hollow and devoid of any true divinity. The long laborous chants of her childhood had been poetry, thought sculpted around words that passed through her soul on the way out of her mouth. She had believed in them so reverently, terrified that her own emotions were leading her astray. Every twinge of anger, every flicker of doubt had been purged through hours of prayer and meditation, kneeling and begging forgiveness as clouds of choking incense made her eyes sting and water. Command School had been different but similar at the same time, high ideals drilled into her head from every direction. The Holy Law of the Alliance, endless codes of honesty, justice, integrity, courage and rules that dictated how to reach each one. She had believed in those with the same kind of fanaticism. They had defined her, made her back strong and her hand steady. They had changed her, made her what she was._

_Until she was really born, there under the violet stone of Torfan in hallways crowded with bodies, the air reeking of death and excrement. She twisted her arm in the crushing grip of the batarian that was trying to strangle her, the bulk of his enormous body preventing her from getting the muzzle pointed at the heart or vital organs. That was fine. A kneecap worked just as well._

_He howled, rearing back in agony as his leg crumpled under him. She slammed the butt of the gun into the side of his helmet, feeling his skull bounce against its walls. Stunned, his grip weakened even more and she surged forward, legs toned by hours of training propelling him back, against the floor where she locked her hands around his throat, the flexible fabric that could stop bullets helpless to protect him against what was coming now. Her gun was gone, it had been knocked from her hand. Or she had dropped it. She could not remember. _

_His fingers groped against her wrists, but there was nothing he could do. Her grip was like steel, so tight her fingers ached and then began to burn fiercely. The chemicals in her blood made everything glow, infused with a scarlet light that made the world startlingly clear. She could see the veins in four eyes exploding, the tongue jutting out between broken teeth, swelling and turning purple as his fighting grew weaker and weaker, his hands falling away, to his sides, his legs twitching less and less violently. Eventually all movement stopped and she was looking at nothing, an empty piece of meat devoid of value. She stood, picking up her gun where it had fallen on the ground beside her. Nothing else moved in the narrow hallway. She did not have to turn Hughes over to know that he was dead, but she did anyway. _

_The bullet had entered his temple and exploded out the back of his skull where she could not see it. Thick lines of blood leaked down his face, out of his mouth, nose and eyes. A ghastly mask of painful death, eyes rolled back into his skull, slivers of milky glass shot with red. It was no more meaningful to her than the face of the batarian she had just strangled and she let him fall back down, onto the floor. She wiped a streak of gore off the visor of her helmet and moved forward, a gleaming predator in the dim light._

_She made her way through three empty hallways and when she came to the final door at the end of the final long stretch of desolate, silent metal she knew this was the end. There was nowhere left to run, nowhere left to hide. The last survivors of this grisly business were her and whoever was in that room. They would be ready for her; weapons trained on the door, every one of them a pin drop away from firing wildly with everything they had. She should have been afraid, should have turned back and sealed the door, kept them in and waited for backup. She was not afraid. She did not wait for backup._

_The door exploded off its hinges in a geyser of blue biotic fire. She was only a second behind it, shards and splinters of metal exploding around her as she surged into the room. She had picked up Rushes' shotgun when he went down, the artery in his leg ruptured under the suit, filling his shin pads with blood before they could even get the thing open. She used it to blow a hole in the nearest body, wide as her hand. His wound steamed in the frigid air as he fell backwards, crashing into the wall and then forward onto his face. _

_"We surrender!" The nearest living batarian shrieked, throwing both hands above his head as she rounded on him. He was not armed, and his eyes were wide white circles of terror. She chambered another round, which took off his face and sent him flying back like rag doll, limbs flailing in every direction. His team mates wailed, wordless cries of dismay or prayers to unknown gods._

_"Stop! Please stop!" Another headshot from the heavy weapon took the next one down, leaning sloppily to the right, but still enough to take out half his brain. His left eyes stayed in tack, or would have if not for the vibration of his skull when the back of it smashed out and splattered the wall. They gelatinized instantly, sliding down his cheeks like thick tears. She continued the slaughter, deaf to their cries for mercy, their declarations of surrender. She had come here, wading through the stink of blood and bile, to dispense justice, not mercy. They fell before her like grain, bent into twisted postures of death. She climbed over them to kill more, not stopping until she heard silence finally descend. _

_Just her own breathing, ragged, parched, ripped by screaming that she had not realized she had been doing. And there, by the door, a soft gasp half disguised, a whimper. Someone was crying._

_She turned, kicking a destroyed body out of the way, and made her way over. The batarian sprawled before her was wounded, his chest fluttering as something foul leaked through the fingers clamped over his gut. She slipped the shotgun into the holster at the small of her back, drew her pistol instead. At this distance, the blast of the bigger gun would coat her with his death. She looked down at herself and realized she was already covered with every kind of gore, flesh and bits of bone pasted to her gauntlets by coagulating blood. A true goddess of terror. Kalima made flesh._

_``Please.:" He rasped, a bubble of blood forming in the corner of his thick lips. "I don't want to die here, a billion light-years from my family on this stinking purple moon."_

"_How many people begged for their lives before you killed them in the Blitz?" Shepard asked. There was no point to this, she knew. Even if the bullet in her pistol did not kill him, the load of lead she had planted in his belly would. She could smell death on him already, through the air-tight glass of her helmet. She realized, suddenly, that she should not be able to smell anything. That most of what was happening right now was stims, fucking with her brain chemistry as much as her muscle and blood. That didn't seem important. _

"_Many. And I killed them anyway." To his credit, the batarian did not make any apologies. "So are you just going to kill me? That's not very Alliance of you." He was trying to sound brave, and failing. Or perhaps that was death, blurring his words, making his voice tremble. Either way, she extended her arm, her sight trained down the barrel of her pistol. He looked up at her, at the cold length of steel that spelled his demise. "Please." He said again. _

"_If you want mercy, pray." She growled. He did. She waited. _

_It seemed that batarian prayer was akin to that of her childhood, long and archaic with a hundred complex ways of expressing the simplest ideas. Protect me in darkness, guide me through death. Take me somewhere better. They were things she had prayed for all her life, prayed and prayed for until her knees locked and it was impossible to stand. She pulled the hammer on her pistol as he neared the end, and the metallic twang of it made his voice quiver. He was still crying, his voice wet and sloppy._

_"Shepard? Shepard are you there? We've just entered the building... god, it's a slaughterhouse in here." Her radio buzzed in her ear, a familiar voice. Lieutenant James Percy. They had known each other since the first day of Command School and been friends immediately. Gone on a few dates, tested the water and backed off when it was obvious that training left little room for anything but sex. He would stop her if he were here, would throw himself in front of the bullet rather than let her kill someone that had surrendered. He would kill her before he let it happen. She turned her radio off._

_"May the Destroyer judge you justly." She said flatly, and killed him._

She woke, shaking violently. Her stomach churned and she lurched her way to the bathroom, barely managing to make it to the toilet before dinner made its comeback. Retching wetly, she sagged over the toilet, pressing her burning forehead against her hands as she tried to get control of herself. Her sick smelled like batarian blood, heavy and acidic. She flushed the toilet and stood on wobbling legs.

"Are you feeling unwell, Shepard? Should I summon the doctor?" EDI's pleasant synthetic voice chimed in from above. She had no console in the bathroom, which Shepard had taken to be comforting at first. It quickly became apparent, however, that EDI was everywhere all the time, whether there was a console or not. She might have peed herself the first time EDI interrupted her in the bathroom. Luckily, she had already been peeing at the time.

"No! No, I'm fine. Just... fine." She sighed, making her way back to her main living quarters. Her neck and shoulders and back ached from all the pushups she had done last night before collapsing into a sleep that had been far from dreamless, in the end. Still, she dropped to the floor almost instantly and assumed the first position of her usual yoga routine, longing for something simple and clean that could distract her.

It had been easy to dismiss her dreams of Mindoir as strange, weird even, but nothing to worry about. As Thane said, she would put it back behind her when the time came. There was no harm in revisiting her feelings, as long as she kept it brief. Torfan was different. She could not afford to re-examine her feelings on Torfan, could not afford another bought of listless depression like the one that had followed her explosion. She had invoked the Destroyer on that man before she killed him, for the first time in years she had called upon god, only to ask him to doom her victim forever. Whatever faith she had left, she had lost it that day.

It had taken her a long time to come back from it. Almost a year, though the Alliance had always been very careful to shield the Butcher of Torfan from any backlash from the outraged public. It was only the massive funeral that had been... difficult. Nineteen coffins draped with flags, in the huge open shuttle bay of the SSV Othello. The heavy staleness of recycled air making her head hurt as she stood, arms folded behind her back, ignoring the thousand eyes that cut accusingly into her from every angle. Most of these were not her fault; they had died serving the Alliance, doing what had to be done in order to take that base. They were heroes. When she had made her way back to her room she had left most of them behind, but those last two haunted her, stalked her dreams and waking hours. They had followed her into a hurricane of violent death for no other reason than her own bloodlust. Rushes and Hughes truly were her fault.

Her arm gave out, suddenly, and she crumpled to the floor with a sudden yelp. Her back was stiff as a board, knots curled into her flesh like nails. She stretched and felt her spine slipping out of alignment and grunted, twisting from side to side. That only made things worse. She needed a chiropractor, or to hit something hard and repeatedly. She knew where to go for at least one of those.

"Garrus, how much do you love me?" She asked, poking her head into the main battery a few minutes later. She was dressed in sparring gear, a one-piece affair of snug, flexible material with gel pads positioned to protect elbows, knees and other vulnerable areas. The tall turian at the console turned around, his small blue eyes narrowed in instant suspicion. Her wide, innocent grin apparently did not inspire any confidence.

"That depends." He said, choosing his words carefully.

"On what?" She asked, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning against the door frame.

"Whichever answer results in my getting hurt the least." He replied. "So I'm going to say... lots. But I'm calibrating the main gun right now, and it's going to take me another hour and a half at least. So you'll have to find someone else to amuse you."

She pouted visibly but Garrus either pretended not to notice or did not know human faces well enough to understand what the jutting lip and slight frown were supposed to communicate. Off duty, secluded from the rest of the crew, she felt much more natural around Garrus then almost anyone else she knew. Two suicide missions, years of suffering and fighting and bleeding and almost dying (or actually dying, in her case) and they were still together. She could not help but love him, like a brother. A giant, scaly brother.

"I wanted us to toss each other around a little bit." She complained, when it was obvious her sighing and pouting was not going to elicit a response from him. "I'll be gentle."

"You said that last time." Garrus pointed out. "And I didn't walk straight for two days."

She grinned at him until he sighed, realizing what he had said. "Damn it. Look, why don't you go ask Thane to spar with you?"

"What is that supposed to mean?" She huffed, instantly on edge again. She was not in the mood for this `Shepard`s got a boyfriend` garbage, especially not from him when he kept giving Tali those longing come-hither looks. He turned to face her finally, abandoning his rapid typing and fixed her with a wicked, dusty blue gaze.

"Well what I meant, was that Thane has excellent hand to hand skills and could probably give you a better challenge then me." He said, crossing his arms over his own broad chest. "But after that little outburst, I'm now very interested to hear what you thought I meant."

"Asshole. Look, it's nothing important. Al-Jilani had a slow news day and I've now got an inbox clustered with messages from people I don't even know asking me if I'm really dating that drell they saw me on the vids with." She rolled her eyes. "Typical meaningless shit, we've got a swarm of hyper-advanced machines hurtling towards us, intent on devouring all our souls, and the best thing anyone has to talk about is the fact I wore pants to a restaurant instead of a skirt."

"And your new... hair? Is that what that stuff is called?" He gestured to her mop of soft blond curls. "In any case, they were talking about it between murder reports on the Citadel News last night. The anchor is thinking about getting hers done like that."

Shepard groaned wordlessly and turned to leave, burying her face in one slim hand.

"Hey, you're a trend-setter. Who'd have guessed?" Garrus teased, turning back to his own work. She flipped him off as she made her way down the hall. Outside of their protective cocoon of normality she was once again the Commander, and nodded gravely at Rupert as he crouched over the sink, scrubbing at something caked onto the breakfast pots. She headed to life support. Garrus had been right about one thing, Thane was an excellent hand-to-hand fighter. If she could not toss her turian friend around, maybe he would be more obliging.

"Thane?" She called as the door slid open. He looked up from his usual seat, meditating before the glowing orb of the core and a small smile touched his stoic face.

"Shepard." He turned back to the window as she came around, taking a seat across from him. "Did you need something?"

"Actually, yes. I've got some... tension. I was hoping to work through it with some sparring, but Garrus is busy." She leaned her chin on one hand. "He suggested you as a replacement."

Thane regarded her with dark eyes full of meaning that she could not understand. His face was very eloquent, she supposed, in its own subtle way. Acknowledging that did not make it any easier to know what he was thinking, though. After a moment he nodded, only slightly, and pulled himself to his feet.

"That sounds... interesting. I've never seen you use hand fighting on the battlefield. Beyond a well-placed elbow, that is." He tucked his hands behind his back. "I shall endeavour not to be too rough. It has been a long time since I did any friendly sparring."

"I'm not fragile. I was top-ranked in Command School at hand-to-hand. Better then the instructor, by the time I graduated." She replied, standing as well.

"I would expect nothing less. You seem to be the best at everything you do." Thane replied. She smiled, then straightened slightly, banishing the warm feelings his compliment inspired. They were talking about fighting, after all. Not flirting.

"We can do it in the cargo bay." She replied, and then realized what she had said. She headed to the door, a slight hitch in her step, her back turned to him so he could not see the blush blooming across her cheeks. God damn! She needed to get a hold of herself before she went completely insane. She had already had this conversation with herself, convinced herself that it was a bad idea. And she was still in love with Kaidan. He followed her, wordlessly. When she glanced over his shoulder his face was as calm and serene as ever. She stopped herself from growling at him. It was not his fault that she was being such a spaz.

They made their way down, undoubtedly feeding the gossip mill with every centimetre of their descent. By the time they reached the bottom Shepard's mind was buzzing, her skin itching for a little combat even if it was only friendly. Thane noticed and raised one of his brows at her in an expression she was beginning to recognize. It was his teasing face, and he only ever seemed to use it with her.

"Perhaps this is not such a good idea." He commented. "You look like you want to tear something in half."

"I'll be gentle." She promised. He did not look convinced.

There were mats for sparring; she had bought them the day after her first bought with Garrus, after bruising her tailbone when he flipped her over his shoulder. For all his complaints, their fights were never one-sided. He always managed to toss her around pretty well, before she found some way to win. Turians were hard, all scales and thick muscle, but they were also slow and not very flexible. And she had gone to Command School long after the end of the First Contact war. Marine martial arts were designed almost exclusively to kill turians. As they took their places in opposite corners of the mat she let her mind go still, emotion falling away in the face of her fighters focus.

Drell were different then almost any race she had fought, at least without armour and a big gun to help her out. Human shaped, with human flexibility but denser muscles that made them surprisingly strong. He would be just as fast as her, just as flexible, but twice as strong. For the first time, as she faced him across their makeshift arena, she felt a flicker of doubt in her abilities. As they moved forward, each suddenly tense and wary, she caught the trace of a smile on his full lips.

There he was, reading her again, peeling away the mask to gaze at her inner thoughts. It annoyed her, so she struck first.

Muay thai, the art of eight limbs, seemed a reasonable opening strategy. It had strong posture, compact, so she could focus on protecting her soft delicate stomach. Drell had four extra ribs, that descended down to protect more of their vital organs and curved inward preventing uppercuts to the body. Her knee and elbow blows would have to come in from the side, take him off balance before she could use something more subtle with his strength out of the way. He dodged her first blow effortlessly, retreating with soft, catlike steps across the mat, studying her. She growled. She did not want to dance, she wanted to fight. He was still smiling.

She tried again, something more military with longer strides and less leg work, swinging her arm in a feint while her other elbow snuck up to take him in the delicate skin under the armpit. He caught her arm, pulling her to the side and she felt her legs fold under her as he applied an astoundingly well controlled amount of force to her torso. She fell backward and rolled, coming right back up to standing position, knees bent. He cocked his head to the side and kept right on smiling. The look in his eyes was careful, considering. She waited for him, and he began to move forward again.

It went like that for a while, feints and light punches from both of them, nothing brutal, and nothing decisive. She cycled through her vast knowledge of hand-to-hand, trying a little bit of everything, melding techniques and discarding them when they did not work. She was sweating lightly when he moved forward, suddenly fast, suddenly explosive with energy. His first punch was headed for her ribs but she blocked him with her elbow, tucking her knee in and pounding it home, into his side, between ribs and hips. He grunted in surprise and his weight shifted, only slightly. He was so damn heavy and she was pulling her punches too much. She took what she could get, punching him in the centre of his chest, sending him back another step. He spun, planting his foot and regaining his balance before dropping suddenly. His kick took her in the knee, making her entire leg buckle. She let it go and was down on the floor, rolling again. He came after her, punches flying before she could get back into defensive posture. She had no choice but to attack again, or muster clumsy but effective blocks to his lightning fast strikes.

They went back and forth like that, grunting and breathing hard as each tried to gain the upper hand. She could not get him off balance, and his speed was dizzying. She reacted with instinct, her style becoming harder, more brutal and less refined. He shifted accordingly, twisting between her heavy blows to unleash barrages of quick chops with the side of his hand which seemed to find only the most tender and pliant areas of her body. She was getting tired, she realized, furious with herself. She did not lose easily. Especially not when it came to fighting, the only thing outside of giving orders she had ever really been any good at.

She threw another punch, too much weight behind it, too much anger. He side stepped, and then his hand was around her wrist, a grip like stone, cool and unyielding. He pulled her close, trapping her other arm in a position where it could do nothing but unleash weak, ineffective hammer blows against his back. His leg curled around hers and he bent at the waist. Suddenly, nothing in her body made sense, she fell back and he fell with her this time, his hand still gripping her wrist, the bulk of his heavy body pinning her against the mat. She tried to move her legs, only to find his firmly positioned, shins crossed just under her knees. She could barely wiggle her toes. She sighed, blowing a few strands of sweaty hair out of her eyes and glared at him.

"Fine, you win." She growled. "But don't let it go to your head."

He did not say anything and she realized, suddenly, how close they were. His hand was still on her wrist, surprisingly smooth and suddenly gentle. She could smell his breath on her face, warm, smelling slightly of exotic spices she had no name for. His whole body smelled like that, like warmth and strength and strange places she had never been. His lips caught her eyes, they looked soft, the line down their centre making something in her chest quiver suddenly. She looked up and his eyes were wide, uncertain, but full of... of something. After a long moment with neither of them saying anything he pulled himself to his feet, retreating across the mat back to his starting point.

"What was that?" She asked quietly, pulling herself to her feet. That warm ache was starting up again, spreading through her stomach and down. She shifted her weight, her feet bare and cold, sticking slightly to the mats underfoot. He turned around, and his face was neutral, but devoid of its usual calmness.

"You know what that was." He said, his tone only slightly reproachful. "You were a part of it as much as me."

That was true, completely true, no matter how much she would have loved to deny it. She rubbed the back of her neck and her hand came away bathed with nervous sweat. She loved the smell of battle, the warm clean sweat of the serenity she only felt in the middle of intense combat. Now, she stank, and wished she was in the shower or really, anywhere that was not here, having this conversation.

"I... I'm not sure." She said finally, her voice feeble even in her own ears. He moved closer, dark eyes fixed on her, seeing straight through the mask of flesh to the doubt that boiled within her. She stepped back and he stopped.

"I see." Was all he said.

"Thane..." She began, holding up one hand and then stopping, not sure what to do with it.

"You don't have to explain, Shepard." He replied, folding his hands behind his back. It was a way to keep him composed, she realized suddenly. The blankness of his face was not all drell stoicism. He was fighting to keep himself so calm, so still and unmoving. "Perhaps I was being foolish."

"No, you weren't. I've been careless." She replied, shaking her head. "I... it's complicated. But I can't do this, Thane. Not right now." She hoped her realized how much she wanted to, how close she had been there on the floor, pinned under his inviting warmth, everything about him so tantalizing and this damn ache that was present even now, screaming for her to throw herself across the narrow distance between him, to wrap herself around him and let go. A moment of silence.

"There's someone else." It wasn't a question.

"Maybe. I don't know anymore. Like I said, it's complicated." Her skin itched and crawled under the sweat. She should say something else, something less stupid and contrite then the 'it's not you, it's me' speech she had given so far. "I need some time to figure things out."

"So this isn't a no?" That was a question, tilted ever so slightly at the end. And maybe even a little hopeful. She managed to smile, beyond relieved, almost not believing he could actually understand something this well. She had barely understood it herself, even as she explained it to him.

"It's not a no." She confirmed.

He smiled back at her, a strange smile but something none the less, and nodded. "I'm glad. We should do this again, sometime."

And then she was gone and she fell back, sprawled across the mats. She was sweaty, confused, angry and sad at the same time. Her heart thundered in her chest, so loud, so hard she could feel it pulsing through the rest of her body. Her blood sand, and she thought about soft green skin, black eyes, lips pushed up in the slightest smile. The ache was growing, in her stomach, her heart, her brain.

She could not take much more of this.


	5. 5

_Her fingers were slipping. The momentum of a million tons of steel ripping itself to pieces tore at her, pulling her legs out behind her in the weightless vacuum, she felt herself drawn toward the hungry void and fought, desperately, hopelessly against it . She struggled to hold on. Someone was calling for her, very far away. Yellow light exploded around her, slicing through the Normandy effortlessly, turning steel to steam just a few feet away. She was blind, deaf, immobile, every ounce of strength in her body focused on just holding to that edge of metal. There was no thought. Her mind gibbered insanely, screaming at her without words, making it impossible to do anything except hold on, fingers aching, burning. Slipping. Slipping. _

_She was gone._

_Things hit her. She bounced off the tip of a shattered wing and felt bones snap. Something crashed into her helmet from behind, raking down her back in a wide sweep, leaving her half paralyzed, staring blankly in every direction. As the Normandy broke itself into smaller and smaller pieces she looked around frantically. There was nothing, nothing but Gerun, the silver and violet gas giant planet below her that seemed so awesomely huge now, filling her vision with its light. The streaks of fire in the upper atmosphere told her that at least some of the crew got off safely. She wondered if Kaidan was there, safe and secure, worrying about her. She began to cry, gasping wetly inside her helmet and thinking for a moment that was why._

_There was no air. Her hands shot back to the hoses that connected her to emergency oxygen. The rush of air over her gloves sent her immediately back into panic. She screamed, crying harder, kicking pointlessly, animalistically. All semblance of reason was gone, replaced by rudimentary terror, animal instinct. _

_Her lungs started to hurt, and she tried desperately to breathe. There was no air, it was rushing out pointlessly against her hands as she struggled, feeling jagged agony spreading along her left side. Her muscles refused to accept this; they strained in her chest, tendons drawing tight, enormous pressure beginning to build in her around her burning lungs. Needles pierced her, medigel, stims of every color and variety. The universe swelled around her, sudden clarity sharpening her vision, making her blood sing, making the pain so much worse. Below her, pieces of the Normandy began to descend, burning up as they entered the higher atmosphere, breaking apart. Everything was clear, sublime, beautiful. Her tendons began to tear, the muscles exploding as her lungs refused to give up their bid for oxygen. She could feel herself start to bleed inside as her tissues tore themselves apart. Her voice broke with a wet gurgle and a tiny sob, and all was suddenly quiet in the vacuum of space. More medigel. More stims. Anything, anything to save her._

_Nothing could save her. Her panic slowed, the blind insanity ebbing as her brain became sluggish. Colors started to blur, became meaningless. She could hear a sharp snapping in her head, like sparks from a fire. Her brain was dying, she realized. She was dying._

_"This can't be real." She thought. The planet glowed under her, a ball of radiance in an otherwise featureless world. Her hands abandoned their blind grasping at tubes, went to her throat instead, scratching at the fabric as though she could force something into her lungs to relieve the unbelievable pain. She searched the light before her, tears still running down her face, scalding hot. _

_There was nothing here. She was alone. There was no one watching over her, no greater plan to her life that explained why she was alive. There was no point to what she had suffered in life, there was no point to anything, all the hours she had spent torturing herself over her decisions had been nothing but a waste of the precious little amount of time she had been given. She was not special. No sublime being appeared from the light to take her hand, to ease the burden. Just as no one had ever cared that she lived, no one cared that she was dead._

_No one except Anderson, and Kaidan. Oh, Kaidan. She had pushed him away so diligently, kept him at arm's length, and interrupted him every time he tried to say it. They were complicating things enough already. They did not need to drop the L-word into the middle of it. There would be time for that after, time for softness, time for love. Or so she had thought._

_If she could have lived, she would not have lived for the huge, empty, pointless galaxy. She would have lived for him._

_With that thought, she died._

The dream had come, and when she woke from it she found she could not move. Deaths phantom fingers probed her skin, gripped her heart until it faltered in her chest, each beat a wet hiccough that made her convulse. Her chest ached, burned, felt like it was exploding all over again. She was crying, saline bitter and salty on her tongue. She had known it was coming, that some day she would fall asleep and it would be there, waiting. As real as it had been the day it happened.

Nothing, not even the knowledge that it would happen, could have prepared her for it.

Eventually she managed to push herself to her feet and stood, staring around her sleeping quarters and wondering if there was any point. When she had been brought back from the dead, everything had happened so quickly. She had not been happy, had not felt the gratitude Cerberus had immediately and loudly believed she owed them. Even as she sat in the shuttle with Miranda and Jacob for the first time, the Lazarus station fading to a spot of reflective white behind them she had wanted nothing more than to slip back into that black oblivion. Where no one wanted anything, where everything was quiet, where her conscience was not constantly at odds with the necessity of every situation.

Standing at the window now, staring out across that same great empty void washed with the blood red light of the Widow nebula she still was not sure if... if she really wanted to be alive. Everything had been so much simpler when she was dead.

She did not try to think about what had happened between the moment she died and when she opened her eyes in the Lazarus medical bay, plunged back into violence and insanity the moment she opened her eyes. It gave her headaches unlike anything she had ever experienced before when she tried, like drills piercing her brain from twelve different directions. Thinking about it made her thoughts blur into each other, the world dissolve into a mass of shrieking noise and indestinct static. She knew that if she thought about it to much she would go crazy and nothing would bring her back from it.

But what she did remember, was awareness. That she had not gone out as she left her body, that there had been something there, waiting for her. She had died an atheist and found the afterlife. Then she had come back. There was no answer to this, no self-help book or twelve step program for dealing with the aftermath of death, of really _knowing _there was something more to the universe than this.

Or maybe the whole thing was really a lie, an illusion cooked up by her traumatized brain to help her cope with the fact that humans were not supposed to come back from that kind of death. When she had tried to pray she had discovered that she still did not believe in God. The awful feeling of being alone as she lost her grip on life was vivid to her in a way that her memories of life after death were not. God remained silent, unobtainable, all the truths he had once represented to her were nothing but tasteless ash in the back of her throat.

She was pacing, she realized suddenly and stopped in the middle of the floor staring down at her feet in horror, as though they had betrayed her. She never paced. Never. The nervous, indecisive energy that caused it had never had any place in a life that demanded quick and effecient action. But here she was, wearing a path between the narrow confines of her living area as she chewed her lip. It made her angry.

She sat down on her bed, rubbing at her aching eyes, resolved not to let herself give into this self-inflicted psychological torture. It wouldn`t help anything, she rationalized as she always had. Maybe she had not reached a full acceptance of her death, maybe it still made her shake and tremble to think of being alone out there again. A space ship commander who was afraid of space. Lord, it was like one of Rupert`s bad jokes. So a turian, an asari and Commander Shepard walk into a bar...

She was tired again, and glanced at the clock on her nightstand. No wonder. She had only gone to bed three and a half hours ago, collapsing onto the mattress after a dinner that was delicious, by the accounts of everyone else assembled and Rupert`s own boasting, but had tasted like nothing to her. Now her stomach was a dead weight, sitting hard and empty in her core. Sleep was impossible.

Shepard pulled on yesterday`s clothes, not caring if they stank, which they did. If sleep was impossible maybe some caffeine would at least clear the heavy fog from her mind and make it easier to think. Not that she really wanted to think, but at least it was something to do.

"Miranda?" She was surprised to see the slender figure seated at the table in the mess hall, especially since her office was just a few steps away. She was nursing a cup of coffee, the only person present at the moment. With the Normandy docked, everyone was enjoying the freedom having little to no assigned responsibilities. Half the time, the ship was nearly empty, everyone out partying or exploring the many sights and sounds of the Citadel. It was the hub of most of the galaxy after all, there would be plenty of time to spend on the Normandy later.

"Shepard." The other woman sounded genuinely glad to see her, looking up from the datapad she had been studying. Shepard gave the coffee pot a questioning look and she nodded. "I just made it."

Gratefully, Shepard poured a cup and brought it over to the table. She did not bother with sugar or milk, just blew lightly on the steaming liquid before taking a sip. "I don't often see you hanging around the ship. Something wrong?"

"No, no, not at all." Miranda replied, setting down her pad. A glance at its contents revealed that it was not the Reaper schematics or star charts that seemed to dominate all of their lives these days. From the differing lengths of the lines and choppy spacing it looked like data packets. Or poetry. "Sometimes I find I get bored with looking at the same office all the time. Not that the mess hall is a big change or anything, but..." She trailed off.

"I understand the feeling." Shepard replied, sipping at her coffee again. The heat of the beverage made her tongue sting but she did not care. It was something to do with her mouth other than talk. She had never really felt comfortable with the other woman, even though she trusted her enough to turn her back in combat and not worry about getting shot. Fighting beside someone was easier for her than making small talk, where her tongue always seemed heavy, her words sliding together awkwardly. She could talk down a terrorist, intimidate a krogan, drive an asari into and out of a murderous rage with a few trips of her tongue. That was like fighting, pointed, purposeful. It was nothing like this.

"Shepard... are you feeling alright?" Miranda's voice was soft, slightly hesitant and concerned. Shepard looked up, cocking one dark brow over her burning eyes. In the low lighting of the ships 'night' cycle her cybernetics worked harder, sharpening lines and adding depth to the blank conformity of shadows. It made them glow brighter, the lenses reflecting more light until the centre of her eyes glowed like those of some hellish cat. Miranda pretended they did not make her uncomfortable, even though she had personally designed them and seen them implanted inside globes of cloned collagen and elastic fibre. Shepard was not fooled, she looked away and put her hand on her forehead, shielding her eyes self conciously.

"No." She said blankly. "I'm not."

She was not sure if there was anyone else on this ship she could have been that honest with. Even Garrus and Tali had certain demands they made, however unconciously, on her to be unshakeable. The firm place for them to catch their breath, as Doctor Chakwas had once described it. Seeing her falter would have put doubt in them, made everything they were trying to do harder. Shepard could not let that happen. She needed to be strong, to be the warrior everyone needed.

She had never been particularly close to Miranda, at least as so far as she was close to anyone on this ship. Jacob and her joked around, punched each other on the arm, gave each other knowing looks filled with humor when the other one slipped up or stumbled. It was a military friendship, the kind she had formed with almost everyone who was not special in her life. Safe, simple and comforting because of it. Samara had been kind, thoughtful, an interesting person to talk to but too different for her to form a real connection to. Grunt was the same, yet opposite, his violence and battle lust too much of a reminder of how she had been once. Jack was Jack, and always would be and Shepard accepted her for who she was. Even Legion, who she should have nothing in common with at all, had somehow always felt closer to her than Miranda. It was much the same with Mordin, who was far too smart to talk to for long periods of time. And Garrus and Tali were... family. And Thane was Thane. There were feelings she had for the three of them that were so much stronger than anything she felt for anybody else in the galaxy anymore.

But Miranda... well she respected Miranda. And the other woman respected her, and she had stayed loyal even when Shepard had turned her back on the Illusive Man. That was, in fact, more because she really believed using the Collector Base was morally abhorrent and less because of how she felt about Shepard. And that was the reason Shepard had let her stay when it was clear she was no longer friends with Cerberus. She could trust someone who put doing what was right beyond their personal alliegances. She always did what was right, after all. No matter how she felt about it.

And the simple truth of the matter was that if there was anyone alive that understood what Shepard was feeling at this exact moment it was Miranda. Because she was the one that had done this to her in the first place.

"I see. Is there... is there anything I can do?" She seemed hesitant, and Shepard understood why. This was out of character for her; she had never been the shoulder to cry on type. Everything was about the mission, about stopping the Reapers and saving humanity from every dark twisted evil they promised. There had never been room in Miranda for softness or long talks about how everyone was feeling. That was Chamber's job after all, though Shepard spent more time helping people get over their problems with more success than Kelly and her psychology degree.

"I don't think so." Shepard replied. "You should probably forget I said anything. I just..." She paused, feeling something bubbling up, through her throat, pushing away her every attempt to swallow it. Like vomit, but messier, more dangerous. "I died."

Silence dominated the air between them, heavy and stagnant. Shepard wished she had just kept her mouth shut, that she had never said anything. But she had started now, and there was no point in waiting for Miranda to come up with a counter point. None existed. She had started this, she might as well finish it.

"I died and I came back, and almost everyone I ever gave a shit about looked at me like they wished I hadn't. Everyone I ever loved wanted me to stay dead because I was dragging up all this emotional baggage that was making them so uncomfortable. Because I was working with Cerberus, and my eyes were orange and I'd CHANGED so much that they didn't recognize me anymore." Her voice was low, controlled, but hot and breathy with emotion. "And I keep asking myself, why? Why are they blaming me for this? I didn't WANT to get sucked out into space, I didn't want to suffocate to death, screaming silently in a frozen vacuum. I didn't want to come back."

"They blame you?" Miranda sounded shocked.

"Maybe not. That's what it feels like though. Maybe they blame Cerberus, maybe they blame god or fate or destiny or whatever other fabricated bullshit they're using to justify existence. But I can always see it, always hear it, like a voice in the back of my head. They all think I betrayed them. One way or another." She sighed, rubbing at the hump of twisted cartiledge in the centre ofher nose. "And I can't say I wouldn't feel the same way. I have changed, Miranda. I'm not the person I was before, I don't think I can ever be again. And it's not your fault, the Lazarus project didn't go wrong. You could never have succeeded. Because I DIED, and that's not something you just shrug off. Not really. Death remembers you, it follows you around. The deaths you cause, the deaths you see, the deaths you can't stop. And now, for me, the death I lived through. It's hard to be alive in that kind of company."

"Shepard." Miranda was at a loss for words, something she had never seen before and doubted she ever would again. Her dark blue eyes were unnaturally bright in the dim lighting. "I don't... I can't give you any answers. I don't know..." She stopped, incapable of speech. Shepard felt a numb surprise at the sudden explosion of emotion from the normally perfectly controlled woman.

"I know. I don't want any... I just want to know that someone understands. That I'm not like this because I want to be." She looked down at her coffee, realizing it was cold. "I'm sorry I put you on the spot. You probably have your own stress, your own problems without listening to my existential drama."

"It's okay." Miranda said, softly. She sounded relieved that she would not have to come up with some sort of comfort for her struggling commander. She also sounded sad, regretting that she could not, because maybe she really wanted to. Maybe they were closer than Shepard had thought. Maybe they had just become closer now, from her sharing that. There were too many maybe's in this conversation, so Shepard stood up and took her cup to the sink, pouring the wasted beverage down the drain.

"I'm going to go try to sleep again." She said. "Thanks, Miranda."

"Anytime, Shepard." She reached for her datapad, paused and looked up again. "And I really mean that. Any time."

A look passed between them, another long moment of silence. Shepard felt better, somehow, something that she could not describe given several hours to try. But she felt better.

"Thanks." She said again, before heading back to her quarters. She did not sleep, once she got there, choosing instead to cycle through the boundless stellar diagrams on her console, trying not to look at the picture glowing faintly by her right elbow. She did not sleep, but she did not pace either.

At first it was easy to work, to lose herself in her plans for the Reaper invasion, running different strategies and scenarios through her head. They were powerful, but they were also arrogant. The Reapers believed that they, organic mistakes, were stupid and weak. There was strength in letting them believe that, in building her strategies around it. For a little while at least, they were arrogant but hyper advanced, nearly immortal, and would soon learn that there was more going on, that they were not stumbling blind and bumping into walls. She would deal with that later.

Eventually, even the salvation of the galaxy could not keep her distracted. She picked up Kaidan`s picture, staring down into his beautiful dark eyes. Her eyes traced the contours of his face, along the thick darkness of his hairline where her hands had once drifted, lazy and soft with pleasure. She touched the glass, her finger running along the line of his lips that she had kissed so often but never enough. What she would have given to hold him again, to feel him close, to breathe his scent. She still loved him, she did, even with what she felt with Thane, even though she longed so desperately to leave him behind.

She had lived for him. She had gone through the Omega 4 relay, risked everything, because when she landed on Horizon knowing he was there and thinking that the Collectors had him she had not been sure if she could take it. The Collectors had threatened billions upon billions of lives and she had fought for them, held them in her head, let them focus her mind and hone her aim. But when she was alone, the night before they made their insane jump into hell, she knew she was really doing this for him. So he would be safe, at least from whatever dark intentions the Collectors had for their race. And such dark intentions they had proved to be. She had stood over the hole where the human Reaper, the sick abomination of unlimited death, had fallen and destroyed that station despite its value because it was right. She had not been sure it was right at the time, until she thought about Kaidan. He had kept her on the right path. Even now, as the reality of what they were facing sunk deeper every day she did not regret what she had done. If she had not destroyed that place, she would have destroyed herself.

But still, she had not replied to his message. Sent the day after they arrived back at the Citadel, the Normandy leaning in space, barren wires still snapping sparks in the air as it sidled into a repair dock.

_Shepard, heard about what happened. Anderson isn`t talking much, but it`s obvious we need to talk. Can we please talk?_

Signed with his name and nothing more. It made her angry to look at it, to have no idea what was going on inside his head, what he was thinking, or even what he wanted to talk about. His message after Horizon had been a jumble of emotions rendered in orange pixels, impossible to decipher. He wanted to move on. He did not know who they were anymore. He wanted to see her.

And she wanted to see him, desperately. But she remained silent, offering no response, hating herself for her cowardice and the sick spiteful satisfaction she got from being as uncommunicative, as unreadable as him. Why should she be the only one who suffered, who clutched her hands together and felt nauseous when she thought about what she had lost, knowing it was still out there somewhere, twisted and warped by time but still so precious, so beautiful and bleak. She had been afraid, more afraid then she could ever remember being, that she would run into him some day before she got around to answering him and that would be how it ended, with both of them hurt and confused, with nothing that she wanted to say being said. She put the picture down and pulled up a message on her console, addressed it to him.

_Kaidan, I'm sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. I'm still not sure what's really going on. I don't know what to say. But we do need to talk. Come see me on the Normandy._

A time, a temporary security pass that would get him through the airlock and let him use the elevator, functions that were cut off for anyone not approved by the XO. She signed it with her name and nothing more, and sent it before she could pussy out and put it off for the rest of the week. She wanted to sail away, back to the stars where business made everything clear and neat and rudimentary. But that would not be fair, would not be right.

She always did the right thing. She had to talk to Kaidan, had to set the record straight, put both of them at ease. Neither of them could move on until she did. And she would not be able to give Thane anything until she had this talk, not even a no. Sighing, she went to bed, tossing herself down on the soft covers, closing her eyes.

Once again, she did not sleep.


	6. 6

Tension was thick on the Normandy, and even though she knew it was her own fault, she had long ago retreated to her quarters in order to escape it. She had snapped at Donnely today, just for asking the most innocent question imaginable about this 'Alenko fella' who was supposed to be coming to see her today. No eyebrow waggling, no winking and nudging, not so much as a saucy inflection of his voice and she had treated it like an accusation. When she went down to apologize to him he had been fine, smiled at her and told her it was no big deal. But she still felt like a shit, and not wanting to offend anyone else she liked, had retreated to the relative safety of her room.

Now she stood in front of the mirror, staring at her reflection, something she was doing with increasing frequency. She had assumed that she would get used to looking nothing like herself. The white blond color she had chosen for her hair softened the darkness of her skin, making her look almost tanned rather than naturally dark. She had liked that. Her Indian heritage still lingered in the thick lashes around her eyes and the roundness of her jaw but it was harder to tell exactly what she was. She did not wear makeup, not even a touch of it to soften her lips or bring out her already striking cheekbones. Marines did not have time to be feminine, for the soft gentleness that was so often associated with their sex.

Now she wondered if maybe she should put some effort into looking nice. On one hand, she did not give a shit what she looked like. On the other, Kaidan might. Then again, he had liked her just fine when she had looked older and been just as plain. She sighed, staring into the orange depths of her backlit eyes and ran her fingers over the aching bump on her nose.

"EDI, what time is it?" She asked the open air.

"Almost fourteen hundred hours, Shepard." Came the prompt reply. Good. She still had time for a shower then. As she began to disrobe, she heard EDI chime in again. "You just took a shower three hours ago, Shepard. And since that time you have done nothing but stare at the wall, your fish tank and the mirror. Are you feeling well?"

Great, even the AI could tell something was up. She shook her head, running her fingers through her short hair. Before she had cut her waist-length mat of curls off three hours would not have been enough time to dry it. She had often tied it up at the beginning of the day, only to take it down fourteen hours later and find it still damp and stringey. Now it felt so dry it was brittle between her fingers, the result of too much washing. Still, she continued taking her clothes off. She felt dirty, oily, disgusting. She did not want to meet Kaidan feeling like this.

"I'm fine, EDI." She reassured the AI in her most soothing voice. Even to her own ears it sounded sharp and fragile, poised to explode into fragments at any moment.

"I have also noticed a disruption in your sleeping patterns. Over the past two days you have had exactly twenty one minutes of REM sleep. This is not healthy for a human of your age and position." The AI reported. It was strange how she addressed concern in exactly the same voice as she issued her various emotionless analysis. She would have made an excellent psychotherapist, sitting on a couch crooning empty words over a note pad.

"I said I'm fine." Shepard snapped.

"Very well." EDI's voice went suddenly silent and she was alone again. Now she felt like a shit again. Because she had hurt her ships feelings.

"Goddamnit." She swore. A shower was not going to fix this, but she took one anyway because she had nothing else to do. Dressing in grey canvas pants and a black tank top she shambled out of her bathroom, bone tired but with no hope of sleeping. She should still have about twenty minutes until Kaidan showed up. She should review the datapad that Mordin had given her this morning, take another look at his findings before she acted on them. There was a lot to think about.

"Shepard." His voice, so familiar but laced with emotions he had never directed at her before, came from the couch in the living area. She whipped around, hand diving instinctually for the gun at her side only to find nothing there. She did not react to surprises well. At first she had thought this was merely because she was soldier, but she had learned differently over the years. She was never off guard, never unprepared. EDI was right, that lack of sleep was starting to affect her.

"God." Kaidan murmured as he climbed the stairs out of the depression where her bed and personal work station lay to stand before her. His black eyes were soft, warm and incredibly distant. She could not read his face, could sense nothing more from him now then she could during the long hours she had spent re-reading his messages. "You look terrible."

She cocked an eyebrow at him, putting one hand on her hip. "Not the greeting I was hoping for." She mused.

"Right, sorry." He looked slightly embarrassed and very concerned at the same time as he shifted from foot to foot, betraying his intense discomfort. "Sorry I'm early but I... I wanted to see you. Sorry."

"Better, but stop apologizing." She said, folding her hands behind her back. A habit she was picking up from Thane, it seemed. It straightened her spine, got her aligned, kept her balanced in the turbulent atmosphere of the room. It was harder though, when she thought of Thane while standing infront of Kaidan. Talk about being pulled in two directions.

Kaidan was everything that Thane was not. Familiar, unpredictable, and not trusted by her. Not anymore at least. Dressed almost casually in black slacks, a white t-shirt under an light Alliance-issue jacket he was fidgeting as his eyes slid off of her and toward her fish, feigning interest in and effort to alleviate the tension. She continued to look at him, schooling her features to keep them flat. He was wearing combat boots, like both of them always did because nothing else fit right on their feet anymore. She was willing to bet he had a pistol holstered, either at the small of his back or under his right arm, since he was left handed, but he still looked very normal. Like someone she would see on the street, passing by on the way to the market or for lunch at the cafe. So recognizable it was hard to believe two years had really passed, hard to imagine where the gulf between them had come from. His handsome face was troubled, the familiar line forming down the centre of his forehead, his dark eyes searching her glowing mechanical ones. She went to stand by her desk, the one littered with datapads and schematics and diagrams rather then the smaller one below with its handful of personal projects collecting dust. She immediately regretted it, as her picture of him lit up at her presence and his eyes flicked immediately toward it and then away. She leaned against the desk, ignoring it. He wisely chose to do so as well.

"You look different. Younger. I didn't notice on... before." He rubbed his knuckles across his forehead, probing the frown line there. It was something she had seen him do a hundred maybe a thousand, times, and when he took a step forward the way he moved was like looking back in time. The strength rippling through his broad shoulders, the almost timid way he approached her as though he was not really sure what to do. "And your eyes..."

She looked away, face suddenly burning. "Yeah, I know, they're weird."

"Just a little." He said. He stopped an arm span away from her and she still felt like he was in her personal space. "But it doesn't matter. Even though you're so different, you're still so you." He paused, running that sentence over in his mind. "If that makes any sense."

"Not really, but thanks for trying." She shot back. She studied him out of the corner of her eye, not wanting to look at him, not wanting to show him the glowing pins of light that had become the largest outward sign of her metamorphosis, her pheonix-from-the-ashes transformation that was bleak and horrible and tragic. He looked hurt. She felt bad, but had no idea how to communicate it. She had no idea why he was even here, what they had to say to each other. Finally she sighed, her shoulders slumping a little bit and shrugged. "Sorry. I... sorry."

"I'm sorry to. Not for this awkwardness." He gestured to the whole room, as though there was a physical presence he was referring to. "But for... well... everything. For Horizon. For the message that I sent afterwards that was so confusing. I didn't know what to say but I had to say something. To let you know that I..." He paused, obviously struggling with his words, trying to find something to define what he was feeling. "That I still felt something."

"Something?" She asked, turning her head only slightly back to him. She kept her head tucked down, the fringe of her bangs hanging into her eyes. Every word coming out of her seemed to be a challenge suddenly, after she had sat down and had a firm conversation with herself about how she was not going to make things worse, she was not going to explode and she was not going to cry. Both reactions seemed equally close at the moment, as she hovered on the edge of tears and rage.

"Something. What more do you want from me?" He sounded angry now, and sad. Same as her, and she shifted her weight uncomfortably under his scrutiny. "I'm trying Shepard, but goddamn. I still have no idea what you did. I saw you got the Cerberus logo removed from your ship but I don't see an Alliance badge in its place. The Council acts like they don't hear the questions reporters ask about you, Anderson won't say two words about you. I still don't know who you are. How can I?"

"You could have asked!" She replied, fire winning over tears, fanned by the heat of his own words. "You could have ASKED me what was going on, instead of just ASSUMING the worst the moment we met! You could have listened to me when I tried to explain!" She stood straighter.

"Explain what? That you died, really died, and an evil organization that we did everything we could to undermine and destroy spent two years and, I'm assuming, billions of credits to bring you back so you could play detective? I couldn't just accept that Shepard, it sounded INSANE." Both of them were yelling, and realized it at the same time, taking deep breaths to calm themselves down. "I needed time, I thought, but time didn't do anything. I'm just... more confused. More lost. I don't..." His hands fell to his side and he looked up at her. "I tried so hard, Shepard. To preserve your memory, but the Alliance made certain threats whenever I tried to say anything in your defense."

"So you just let them say I was crazy. Delusional." She could not keep the poison out of her voice. "You just stood by and nodded while your bosses tore me apart, spat on everything I did. Spat on Ash's death..."

"The Alliance has done nothing but honour Ash's sacrifice." There was a dark note in his voice and she knew she had poked a sensitive spot.

"Ash died so we could stop the Reapers, Kaidan. She gave her life not only for the rest of us, but for the rest of the goddamn galaxy because she understood what was at stake. Every time the Alliance says there aren't any Reapers, every instant they stop the truth from coming out and the galaxy from mobilizing to fight them is a moment that we lose. Every time they hold us back from being ready for what's coming they risk losing this war before it begins. They risk losing everything. And if we lose, that means Ash died for nothing. That everyone we lost died for nothing." She met his eyes finally. "You can't tell me you don't see that."

"Maybe I do, Shepard." Kaidan replied. He sounded so tired, and she realized he was squinting in the soft light. A migraine. She recognized it instantly and, had this been the old days, would have insisted they finish this conversation later. She could never cause him any pain. But there was not a later anymore, if they ended this conversation now they would never see each other again. "But what was I supposed to do? I was by myself. Everything fell apart without you there, and the Alliance was the only thing I had left. I was hurting, and nothing made sense and... I just didn't want to lose more than I already had. When you died... god, I thought I could never be happy again."

He took a step forward, and there was nowhere for her to go, no escape. She could feel his warmth, the closeness of him; smell his familiar scent of soap and shaving cream. They were clean, simple, military smells that she had always loved and had always been attracted to. She was still attracted to them, even as her mind reeled and sputtered, not capable of forgiving him, but wanting to. Was this right? Was this what she wanted? Was she only still mad because she felt some sort of justice in hurting him, some petty satisfaction that was a continuation of her stony silence? She was better than that. She wanted to do the right thing.

"I don't know what's supposed to happen now." His voice was so soft, so gentle. "I don't know what you want to say, what you want to talk about. I didn't come here for this, to defend myself or accuse you. We won't get anywhere with it, what's done is done." He paused. "I came to tell you I love you, because I never did when we were together and I always, always regretted that. From the moment you didn't step out of that escape pod. I love you, Shepard."

"I..." Her voice faltered. Here it was, the moment of truth. She had died wishing she had done what really mattered, said what was really important instead of letting herself be numb and calling it her duty to the galaxy. This was her moment to say it, Kaidan's dark eyes searching hers, not expecting anything but still so fragile. He was waiting for the blow, waiting for her to tell him that it had all really been nothing, that she had never felt anything. "God, Kaidan, I don't know what's going on anymore than you do."

She slipped out, around him, away from his desk. "I... I don't know if you even believe me. That I really died. But I did." She leaned her forehead against the fish tank, seeking its coldness against the pounding pressure of her brain. "I died, in agony, all alone in space and all I could think of was you. How I shut you out, and tried to say it was because of my job when really it was because I was afraid. I was afraid to be vulnerable, I was afraid to be weak, I was afraid of everything. I'm sorry. I love you. From the moment we kissed, that night before Ilos, I loved you. You showed me myself, and for the first time I didn't hate what I saw."

She felt his hand on her shoulder, turned and faced him again. They looked at each other for a long moment, the warmth of his hand against her arm the only thing she could feel.

"So what happens now?" He asked, quietly. She put her hand against his, leaned close and brushed her lips over his, felt him stiffen and take a quick breath that shuddered in his chest. That ache, that pure physical need for contact, for sex and tenderness and anything that was not the flatness of her life in recent weeks was back, coursing through her blood to every nerve. All she wanted to do was tear his stupid civilian clothes off, shove him down on the bed and ride him until there was not an ounce of strength left in her. She wanted to stick her tongue down his throat, run it across his chest, snake down his body in that way that made him blush, ever so lightly across his smooth olive face. She wanted to hold him in the afterglow and feel that warm correctness that she missed so much.

"I think you better go." She said, stepping back until she felt the cold glass of the fish tank pressed against her bare shoulder blades, off setting the fire raging across her skin.

"Really?" He asked. He did not move, did not step back from her and she met his eyes for the first time, even though she could see they made him uncomfortable, reminded him of everything that was different about her. "You just said..."

"I know what I said, and I meant every word. I love you, Kaidan Alenko, and I always will. But you're still Alliance, and I'm not. I'm going to be working with them more closely now, but if it comes down to making nice with the Admirals or saving the galaxy you know which one I'll choose. If it comes down to breaking the law or stopping the Reapers I won't hesitate. I'll do whatever I have to in order to stop this. And you won't. You can't. You're as Alliance today as I was before I died, and that means that no matter how much we love each other, no matter how much we want each other, it'll never work." The truth poured out of her like a river and she realized she was crying. This was not how it was supposed to go, not the way she had imagined it. She was supposed to be righteously angry, scorning him for turning his back on her and everything they had fought for and believed in. She was supposed to grab him and hold him tight and love him forever. Not this. She could have handled anything but this incredible pain in her chest, as sharp and intense as dying all over again.

"But after..." He started, and she shook her head.

"You can't ask me to make that promise. You can't ask me to promise I'll come back from this war, or even that I'll be alive this time tomorrow." She stopped, swallowing her tears. "And I can't ask you either. It was real Kaidan. We were real. But... it's over. Maybe in another time, another life, we'll get a second chance. But this is... this is over. And I think you should go."

He stood still for a long time and then took a step back. She knew he would never be that close to her again, that she would never feel the close heat of his body next to hers and the knowledge cut her to the bone. He took a deep breath, his shoulders shaking slowly and then, to her great relief, he nodded.

"You know best Shepard." He looked up and there were tears in his liquid dark eyes that did not fall. "I... I don't know how I'll feel about this in an hour, or a day, or a week. But... you know I'll always be here for you right?"

"As my friend." She nodded. "I know, Kaidan."

They shook hands, and then he left. Shepard sat down at her desk, staring blankly around the cold steel walls. Her fish floated serenely, blissfully unaware of the maelstrom of violent emotion that had just passed through the room, of everything that had ended with just a few simple words. She picked up the picture on her desk and opened a drawer, placing it gently inside. Her chest still hurt, still ached. A huge part of her wanted to run, wanted to give up everything and run to him and hold him close and tell him it was a big mistake, that he should stay with her. That she would stay with him, whatever he wanted.

But she always did what was right, so instead she folded her arms on her desk, put her head down and cried for a very long time.

Later, when the tears were dry, when her face was less puffy, when she was able to choke down the emotions that were strangling her she managed to read through Mordin's findings. The cybernetics that Cerberus had pumped into her body were more advanced than anything he had ever seen, and he apologized profusely for taking so long to come up with something. She had asked him about this a week ago, gotten the chest x-rays a day later. She shook her head, still amazed by the proficiency of the salarian mind. Everything looked fine, better than fine, it looked damn near miraculous. She clutched the pad in her hand and took a few deep breaths.

When she had stilled her mind, stilled everything inside her, as well as she could she took the elevator down to deck three. She still had no idea what she was going to say, how to break this kind of news. She supposed there was no way to prepare. She would just have to be herself. Even if 'herself' was nothing more than a sleep-deprived emotional trainwreck these days.

The door whooshed open and she stepped into the dry, slightly musty air of life support with a hundred possible conversation starters bumbling through her mind. She stopped when she caught sight of the pair of people sitting at the table, both of them looking at her now with the slightly uncomfortable expression she had come to recognize. Miranda and Thane had just been talking about her.

Her distaste for the situation must have shown in her face because Miranda stood instantly, looking ashamed. Shepard wanted to punch her. What she had said in the mess hall was between them, was a sign of the trust that she had for the other woman. Not an invitation for her to go blabbing about Commander Shepard's personal crisis to anyone. Or not just anyone, to THANE who should have known with his endless analysis of her that she would hate it.

"I can come back later." Shepard said flatly, knowing that if she walked out that door now she would never come back. Mordin could deliver the information in this datapad just as well as her. Well perhaps not as efficiently, but he could take care of it well enough. Thane shook his head. Evidently, he realized this as well and his gaze was intense. He did not say anything, she would not have this conversation in front of Miranda, but his eyes told her to stay, that he would explain if she let him. She did not want to have another emotional conversation today, but that was what she had come down here to do anyway. The only difference was that now she was going to have to be emotional to.

"No, no, I was just leaving." Miranda replied, waving her hands nervously. She looked at Thane, who gave her the slightest nod to a question in her eyes that Shepard did not see. Then, she turned sharply and strode to the door, the breeze her nervous speed stirred up smelling faintly of floral perfume and sweat. She looked tired, Shepard thought dully. Then again, they all did. When the door closed again, leaving them in quiet seclusion, she turned back to Thane and tried not to look angry before he explained. Apparently she did not succeed.

"You must have had quite the conversation with Miss Lawson to look so offended that she might have shared it with me." Thane observed quietly. He said nothing more until she made her way to her usual seat, across from him. She sat down, her posture ram rod straight, full of tense energy. He examined her, taking his time, and said nothing for a long moment. "She did not. At least not in any detail. She merely said that you were upset, and wondered if there was anything I might say to you that would help. I understand she had a similar conversation with Mr. Vakarian earlier. She's worried about you Shepard, and you have no right to be angry about that."

She glared at him for a moment longer, for having the unbelievable gall to be so right about everything all the time, and slumped back in her chair. The sudden relax of her muscles told her just how tense she had really been. She set the datapad down on the table and rolled her shoulders, unpleasant cracking noises rolling through her body as bones ground and shifted under her skin. Thane sighed.

"I suppose our sparring did not help your tension as intended." He remarked wryly. All their fighting had done was stir up a whole bunch of unmentionable sexual tension, and they both knew it. They could both still feel it, hanging in the air between them. "How was your talk with Commander Alenko?"

At least that killed the mood fairly efficiently. She shifted uncomfortably, but he did not apologize like he normally did when topics she did not want to talk about were broached. She supposed he had a right to know, she had said that it was not a no between them after all, but she did not want to talk about it, not this soon.

"In some ways, it went well. We agreed to be friends, at least, though we'll see how well that works out." She met his eyes, too raw and wounded to say much of anything else about the subject. He looked sympathetic, at least. "It still... hurts. It hurts like a bitch."

"I understand." Thane replied, and made no more mention of the subject. For a few moments, silence stretched and Shepard relaxed back into her seat. She had not been down to see him since their conversation after sparring, convinced that she had to work out her feelings before she could have this easy companionship again. But that was not the way it was at all. Even with no music playing, or food, or much of anything to think about she felt safe here. Comfortable. She smiled at him and leaned forward, picking up the datapad.

"I think you should look at this." She said, handing it to him. He quirked an eyebrow and accepted it, his fingers tapping at it slowly at first, and then faster, his brows contracting over his dark eyes. His expression was more animated then anything she had ever seen as he scanned graphs and equations and diagrams. When he looked up at her again, she had to reach out, to cup his suddenly trembling hands in hers.

"Are these estimates accurate?" He asked, a slight tremor in his voice. He looked scared, terrified, and hopeful to. She bit her lip and tilted her head to the side.

"I honestly don't know. You'll have to ask Mordin. But what I think he said, was that he really doesn't know either. Those schematics are based off the implants Cerberus put in my lungs. I... I suffocated to death Thane. I didn't freeze, my blood and guts weren't sucked into the vacuum. I got a puncture in my air supply and I suffocated in space. Those implants made my lungs work again." She paused as he looked back down at the datapad. He looked so lost, so confused. Afraid to hope for everything a handful of tiny implants might mean. They were no bigger than the nail of her smallest finger, but they were more valuable to him than anything else in the world. "They might give you a year. They might give you five. They might give you ten, or hell, even more. They might do nothing but make it a little easier to breathe in the meantime."

He stayed silent and then, very carefully, laid the datapad down on the table. He looked back up at her, and she could see there were tears shining in his amazing dark eyes. He blinked and they ran down his face. His now empty hands wound around hers and she just sat there with him as he absorbed the implications of what she had just told him. She cleared her throat and he looked up.

"I understand if you want to leave. After you get the implants." She said, slowly, choosing her words carefully. "The Reapers probably won't be here for years yet. But the Normandy isn't going to sit around waiting for them, we're going to war now. We're going to unite the galaxy, mobilize them for what's coming, and get ready for a hell unlike anything anyone has ever seen before. You told me low survival odds didn't concern you, when I first recruited you, but these will change that. If you want to go, to use what time these implants give you to spend time with your son I... I understand. I won't stop you."

"Shepard..." His grip on her hands tightened and he shook his head, speechless. "I can't... there aren't... you..." He was actually at a loss for words. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly.

"I am here with you, until the end." He said finally. "Until we die, or the Reapers are defeated. Not because of these," he nodded to the datapad, "but because I want to do something good for the universe. I cannot imagine there is anywhere I could go where I could do that more effectively then where I am right now. At your side."

She let out a sigh of relief that stirred the curls hanging into her eyes. Thane never seemed uncomfortable when she fixed them on him, she realized suddenly. He never seemed uncomfortable around her at all. She did not think, looking back at her long life, that she could say that about anyone else she had ever met. She smiled at him.

"We should go. Mordin is waiting for you." She said. They stood, and she walked to the med lab with him, where Mordin's miracle was indeed waiting.


	7. 7

A/N: Hey guys! I never have any idea what to say here without sounding sappy or awkward, but I just really wanted to let you guys know how much I appreciate all the great reviews I'm getting. I really struggled with chapter six, and they helped me push through and get it done. And now we've arrived at the part of the story I really want to write, and I'm really excited to hear what you guys think of it.

Six chapters of buildup might be a bit much but trust me my friends, shit is about to get real. Enjoy.

---

"Shepard. I see you didn't take my advice." Aria T'Loak commented, as Shepard settled her heavily armored frame onto the delicate leather seat at her left hand. She raised one eyebrow in the pretty asari's direction and the woman waved one slender hand. "I told you to find a man, but you look more tense now then you did before you went through the Omega 4 relay. I could set something up for you, if you`re having trouble."

Shepard leaned back, crossing one ankle over her knee and her arms over her chest. She was exhausted, not in any mood for game-playing, but there was nothing else to do with Aria. The woman always had to have the upper hand, the conversational advantage, and as a result talking to her was much like beating her head against a brick wall. She could, eventually, go places but she was inevitably going to get a headache in the problem. "Thanks, but I`m not interested in a match maker. I see you`re well informed as ever, Aria. What else do you know about what happened?"

"I know that human colonies stopped disappearing." She replied. "Other than that... speculation, rumor, outright lies. More of the last than anything else." She narrowed her stunning eyes in Shepard's direction, but evidently was unhappy with the blank and intensely uninformative expression on her face. She stood, looking out over the blazing hot and frantically packed nightclub that formed the jewel of her empire.

"What do you want here, Shepard?" She asked, finally. "I'd assumed you would run back to the Alliance and start trying to get them onboard with your Reaper war again or at least get back to your self-righteous sheriffing of the galaxy. I certainly didn't expect to ever see you again."

"The Alliance won't listen to me." Shepard replied bluntly.

"That doesn't surprise me." Aria laughed, folding her arms under her breasts and continuing to stare out across the red-washed dance floor below. "What surprises me is that you think I will."

"I don't care if you listen to me or not Aria, at least not today. But I figured it would be fair of me to come and tell you what I'm going to do, since you gave me no small amount of help while I was hunting Collectors." Shepard replied. That peaked the other woman's interest, at least enough to draw her gaze away from the dancers spinning around their cieling mounted poles. She sat down again, her lovely yet dangerous eyes picking over her visitor from head to foot.

"Tell me then." She attempted to sound bored, and failed.

"I'm going to unite the Terminus." Shepard replied bluntly. One of the guards laughed, a sound which died quickly in his throat as he realized that she was not joking.

A moment of silence passed between them, where even Aria could not hide her shock and then her outright disbelief. "I think the Omega 4 relay softened your brain. No one has ever managed to unite the Terminus Systems, not for anything. Pirate kings, mercenary bands, warlords, matriarchs, murderers and kingpins, every variety of evil has tried and every single one ended up in a body bag. Eventually. Most of them were begging for it."

"I'm not a pirate, a kingpin or a mercenary. I'm not any variety of evil." Shepard replied.

"Which makes what you are saying even more ludicrous!" Aria's voice was heating up, suddenly full of angry emotion. It was the most that Shepard had ever seen from her before, but she schooled her own features, keeping them placid and neutral, letting Aria lose her composure. "That's all the Terminus System is, a collection of criminals fighting over scraps. Who among them is going to follow you?"

"The Terminus Systems are ruled by criminals. It's full of people, every day people, who have flaws and virtues just like those that live in Council space. I don't give a shit about pirate kings and their petty power struggles. I'm going to unite the real people of the Terminus, so I can protect them from what's coming. So they can protect themselves." Shepard kept her voice calm, which only seemed to annoy Aria more. She stood up again, and started to pace back and forth. Her guards stared, first at her and then back at the woman in her white and grey armour that was eliciting such a response with her bold, insane claims.

"So what, are you just going to kill everyone who stands in your way?" Aria demanded. "The Blue Suns, the Blood Pack and Eclipse already all hate you, and they're just the beginning. The very, very tip of a legion of scabby villains who are going to want you dead if you try to do what you say you're going to do."

"If I have to, I will." Shepard replied, uncrossing her legs. "Which is why I came to tell you what I intended before I started. I will kill you Aria. If you get in my way."

That stopped her, made her back go suddenly rigid, the elaborate, inter-connected lines painted along her brows contracting as she frowned. "Is that a threat?" She hissed.

"Yeah, it is." Shepard answered bluntly. "So we can do this a few different ways. We can all try to kill each other right here and right now." She eyed the bodyguards reaching for their weapons and then nodded at her own companions, Tali and Garrus, who had already drawn their guns and lined up shots. "I can walk out, go get started and we can come back and try to kill each other later. You can get out of my way, which means leaving Omega and the Terminus behind in case you were wondering, or you can help me."

"Do you really think you can win a fight here? In the middle of enemy territory? With me?" Aria's azure eyes gleamed in a similar way to Shepard's in the ruddy red light, pins of fire in unknowable depths. Shepard had not stepped into this conversation without certain things worked out.

"It's possible that I could lose. I'm sure you've set up all sorts of elaborate fail safe measures, which I could have missed and I suppose it's possible that my backup team overlooked one of your snipers when they infiltrated the upper level and set up position." She nodded up at the corner where a poorly hidden turian sniper usually crouched. Legion waved one mechanical hand back, never moving his eye from the scope that was trained directly on the suddenly much less aggressive asari and Aria's eyes narrowed.

"Interesting company you've started keeping, Shepard." She said, settling back down in her seat.

"Only the best, Aria. You might be king shit on Omega, but Omega is a pisshole at the best of times." She ignored the furious look THAT little comment earned her, pressing on. "And you know it. You can't beat me like you beat Patriarch or the hundreds of other scurrying little cowards you've crushed over the centuries. If you try, it'll only end badly for you."

For a long moment they glared at each other, or rather Aria glared at her while Shepard returned nothing but a mute and unrepentant stare. Finally, the other woman looked away.

"What exactly do you want me to do?" She asked.

"Put out a message through all your channels. Tell the pirates, the slavers, the mercenaries that lord over the weak and the poor in this string of shit-hole planets that I'm coming for them. That they have no chance. Tell those weak and poor that they have no reason to fear anymore, no reason to keep their heads down and let them be walked all over." She stood, stretching and swinging her head from side to side to crack her neck. "Tell them there's a war coming, and that in the end the only thing that can save them is themselves."

She headed down the stairs, past the shocked and confused bodyguards with their open mouths and quivering mandibles before she turned and tossed a thought over her shoulder.

"And make sure you get the message yourself. I might like you, a little bit, but I meant what I said. If you get in my way, I'll kill you." She turned her back again, the space between her shoulder blades itching as Aria stared daggers into it.

"You don't act much like the saviour of the galaxy." She called after her. Shepard shrugged, not turning around.

"Heroes only live in heroic worlds." She replied, before she made her way out, Tali and Garrus keeping their hands on their weapons until the last set of double doors had slid closed behind them. The elcor bouncer glanced up at them, ignoring the eternal crowd of prattling posers trying to make their way into the famous club. She supposed there was nowhere else to go on Omega, but Shepard rolled her shoulders and made a face, feeling like the sweat and stink had bypassed her armour and found its way into her living skin. Beside her, Tali let out a whooshing sigh of relief.

"I wish you'd told us what you were going to say in there." She commented. "I mean, I always knew we were going to have to unite the Terminus in order to fight the Reapers, but I didn't expect you to be quite so... direct about it."

"What do you mean, you knew?" Garrus asked, rubbing the steel plate that had replaced much of her lower jaw on one side. "It sounds insane. I never heard a word about it until we were inside there, with guns already half-drawn."

"The Alliance and the Council are already set up to deal with threats; they just don't believe there is one." Shepard explained tersely, as they made their way back toward the Normandy airlock. Legion did not join them; he would find his own way back through a more subtle route that would cause less panic. "The Terminus Systems are spread out, constantly fighting with each other and led by a bunch of greedy idiots. They also contain roughly a third of the galactic population. If the Reapers are smart, and we know they are, where do you think they're going to start their attack?"

Garrus nodded slowly. "I understand the logic, Shepard, but Aria was right. No one has ever even gotten close to uniting the Terminus systems and with your former Alliance ties..."

"I know what I'm up against, Garrus." Shepard cut him off as they reached the airlock and punched in the code that allowed them access. "But I've never let the odds keep me from trying, and succeeding. I seem to remember people telling us it was impossible to get to Ilos, or through the Omega 4 relay and back, or to destroy the Collectors. We'll figure it out."

"You will, Shepard." Garrus confirmed, sounding more confident already.

"I said we Garrus." She reminded him, as the beams of sanitizing light began sweeping over them. She scratched automatically at her scars, which were prone to itching and always aggravated by the dry crawling sensations that accompanied decontamination.

"I heard you. And I said, you. You always figure everything out, we are but your humble lackeys, following blindly and getting shot at for you." His voice was deep, rumbling with teasing mirth. She punched him in the arm.

"Asshole. You guys are like my family." She turned to Tali, it was impossible to read her expression under the mask but she was willing to bet she looked as shocked as Garrus. She had always assumed that they knew how she felt but... well it was possible she was as difficult to read as she blamed other people for being. She smiled after a moment, and put her hands on their shoulders. "I mean that. If I'm going to go on another insane mission intending to do the impossible I can't think of anyone I'd rather have with me then you two."

"Then why do you always call me an asshole?" Garrus asked, his mandibles vibrating in what Shepard knew was a strong show of emotion.

"Because you are an asshole." Tali replied. Her voice sounded tight, as though she were holding back a tide of strong feelings, but happy. Her two-fingered hand rested on Shepards own shoulder.

"Totally." Shepard agreed, and they all went back inside to dinner.

Later, after assuring Rupert that his vegetarian take on burritos were fabulous and cramming one down her unresponsive pallet as proof she made her way to life support, as she almost always did when she was off duty even though she was exhausted. Donnely gave her a knowing wink as she punched the holopad to allow herself access and she gave him the finger in response. It seemed like every day the crew grew closer, tighter. She wished she could be more a part of it and less like a spectator trying to fit in, but there simply were not enough hours in the day. She had to take what she could get, and she chose Thane almost every time. He always looked her in the eyes, after all.

"How are you feeling?" Shepard asked, as she took her regular seat. Her brain was humming dully, a constant vibration she could feel in the back of her skull that was becoming increasingly distracting as days dragged on. Outside of mission it was becoming hard to stay focused, hard to hear anything outside the droning static of her exhausted, half-formed thoughts. But she focused on him as he shifted in his seat, running a hand over his still heavily bandaged chest. He should still be in medical, but he was as stubborn as her. He did not want to stay in bed.

He smiled broadly at her, something he had been doing with increasing frequency despite his obvious discomfort as the healing continued. It had been a week and a half since the surgery and, by all accounts, he was making a perfect physical recovery. Seeing him so happy was a great relief, since it indicated his mental health was not far behind.

"Siha, I feel amazing." He said, his voice a deep thrum of genuine pleasure in the back of his throat. He had started calling her that the day after his surgery, when he woke from the stupor of anesthesia still blurry eyed and only half aware of what was going on. She had been there, of course, drinking tea and pretending to read some poorly written political diatribe about her fake death and what a betrayal it was while she watched him sleep. He had steadfastedly refused to tell her what it meant, seeming to take pleasure in the way she pretended it annoyed her. "I had forgotten what it meant to breathe without pain."

"I'm glad." She replied honestly, grinning. She waited a moment, then made a great show of leaning slowly toward him, pretending at casual conversation. "So are you going to tell me what Siha means today?"

"Today?" He made a great show of thinking carefully about it. "No, I don't think so."

She pouted visibly, crossing her arms over her chest and leaning back in her chair again. "You suck. I could just go on the extranet and find out you know, or get EDI to find out for me."

"Indeed you could. But I can see that you have not, and therefore I have no reason to believe you shall make good on those threats now." He replied, smirking at her over the bridge of his scaled knuckles. She glared at him for a long moment, strumming her fingers against the table as she thought of various ways she could wipe that satisfaction of his face. There were lots of things she would love to do, close, hot, sticky things that would do something to quell this raging female hard-on she was carrying beside her overwhelming exhaustion. But she could not do any of those, not yet. He was still recovering, both from the surgery and from the shock of the sudden change in his situation. And she was still recovering from what had happened with Kaidan. Luckily, none of that needed to be said out loud.

"Well, maybe I`ll come up with a nickname for you then." She said finally, after a long moment of fantasizing about what his amazingly vibrant skin might look like under all that leather and bandages. He narrowed his eyes only slightly as she looked up toward the cieling, thinking hard. She grinned harder at the look on his face as she began to think out loud, not particularly in his direction, but still watching him.

"Something human and obscure, so you won't know what it is." She mused, tapping one finger against her lip as she thought. There were many options that she dismissed instantly for being too sappy, too obvious or something that another member of the crew might identify if they overheard. Her thoughts wandered back and back, through the various poems and books she had been forced to study during her highschool equivalency courses at Command School, the stories she had heard during her three years of aimless wandering and back to Mindoir, to the tales of her childhood. Something stirred there, something human, obscure and very, very fitting.

"Have you ever heard of Rama?" She asked, pronoucing the word with an accented twang she had spent hours and hours of speech therapy carefully eliminating. He narrowed his eyes even more.

"Yes, I know exactly what you are talking about." He lied, poorly.

"Then Rama it is." She said, pushing herself up with both hands. "Some day, I'll tell you what it means."

As she moved to walk past him, he extended one hand, touching her wrist lightly. When she looked down at him all hints of their playful flirting were gone. He looked suddenly serious and nodded back to her seat. She hesitated, not sure what could have brought such a look to his face. She had been coming by at least every other day since his surgery and it had seemed like they were going to do nothing but tease each other and make small loops of comfortable conversation. After a moment, she sat again, folding her long hands in front of her.

"How are you feeling?" He asked, quietly. She leaned back, feigning casualness and flippancy, but was instantly put on guard. Even though she had not caught anyone talking about her since she had walked in on Miranda and Thane she could feel eyes on her every time she walked down the hall, disecting the bags under her eyes, the slouch in her shoulders, the way she dragged her feet sometimes as though they were too heavy to lift. She tossed one hand in the air, as though brushing away the question.

"I'm fine. Just fine. Why does everyone keep asking me how I'm feeling? What do they expect?" She could feel a twinge of irritation building. Who said she always had to be fine? Everyone else seemed about ready to fall apart at the seams half the time, why should she always have to be the superman, picking up the pieces and molding everything back the way it was?

"I expect everyone keeps asking you how you are feeling because you look terrible." Thane commented softly, studying her. She could feel his gaze moving along her shoulders, where the muscles bunched into rock-hard knots and along the slouching posture she had aquired since her bones seemed too tired to hold her up properly. When he looked back up at her face she could feel his gaze linger around the dark bags under her eyes, the wrinkles that were beginning to spring up across her forehead and around her full lips despite the Cerberus facelift. She shifted, folding her arms across her chest.

"Thanks." She grumbled sullenly, turning to look at the guns mounted against the wall instead. There was some smart-aleck joke to be made about guns in a life support room, but she could not think of it at the moment. She proceeded to ignore him, and he proceeded to wait for her to stop being irrational. Finally, her head snapped back and she glared at him. "What do you want me to say?"

"I want to know how you are feeling." Was his maddeningly simple reply.

"I'm just tired." She lied. "I haven't been sleeping well."

"Mindoir again?" He leaned forward and his fingers twitched as though he wanted to reach out and touch her. Her hands were tucked firmly into her armpits though, supporting her defiant cross-armed position. He kept his folded together, hiding his mouth behind them. It was his most expressive feature, or at least the only one she could read with any accuracy, and it sometimes bothered her that he went to such lengths to hide it. She did not mention it though, not at the moment.

"Sometimes. Other times... no. I did some things in between there and Command School that were... not good." She sighed. "And there was Torfan."

He nodded, saying nothing. She could feel the momentum of her confession boiling up and choked, coughing into her hand to hide it. She had spent enough time pouring over her feelings and having touchy-feely conversations about them. And he had enough of his own pressures and issues to deal with. She did not need to make things harder on him, to pile things on at this most delicate time. But his silence spurred her on, made things come rushing out.

"And after Torfan there was Ash, that is Ashley Williams, and so many other bodies while I was hunting Saren. And then I died. And then there were the Collectors and that... thing." Her lip curled as she thought of the malevolent orange eyes, the vortex of shrieking death that had exploded out of a jagged metal mouth in a desperate bid to consume and destroy her. "And all those liquified colonists. I keep... seeing things everytime I close my eyes. If I sleep I don't rest, so it's easier not to sleep at all."

"You're going to have to sleep eventually." Thane replied, his voice sympathetic at the same time as it was pragmatic. "That is simple biology."

"I know. I keep hoping if I make myself tired enough I won't dream." She set her hands on the desk, running her fingers across the back of her hand. Once, there had been a scar there. An ugly purplish swath of jagged tissue left by a clumsy drunk with a broken bottle who thought that he could tell her what to do. There had been a lot of people in her life, at that point at least, who had been stronger than her, but not him. Whenever she touched the back of her hand, she could feel the tremor of his snapping bones shake up her arm, a phantom of violence and anger. She felt it now.

"Siha." Thane's hand was there, suddenly, folding over the smooth skin that had once borne so much damage. She looked up at him. "Have you thought about seeing the doctor?"

"I am not going to take pills to fix this." She insisted fiercely. "Stims are a necessary evil, but I'm not some loser who can't be happy without a head full of chemicals. I'll beat this the same way I've beaten everything else. By being too stupid and stubborn to give up."

"If these dreams of your past haunt you so, perhaps you have not beaten everything as thoroughly as you thought." Thane said gently. She snapped her hand out of his grip and stood up abruptly. Some piece of her that remained rational told her that she was not helping anything as she moved to the other side of the room, arms crossed again, glaring at the mass effect core. She heard him stand as well, the gentle creaking of leather, a muffled grunt as some pain of surgery stung him. "There isn't any weakness in needing help, sometimes. Depending on it, maybe, but you've never depended on anything but yourself. I don't see that changing."

"I don't need pills." She insisted fiercely.

"Yes, you do." Thane replied, bluntly. "You need to sleep. I can see it in every inch of you. You're being irrational because you're too tired to think straight."

"I can think just fine. I just talked Aria T'Loak into helping me unite the Terminus Systems." She replied defiantly. He just looked at her for a long moment, face blank.

"Perhaps you should sit down. This is worse than I thought." He said finally. She glared, opening her mouth to say something scathing before she realized he was teasing her. She was not sure if that made her more or less angry until she started laughing, and leaned her forehead against the cooling glass of the window. He stepped closer, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Siha, I worry about you."

"Don't. I can handle it. I can handle anything." She replied, looking up at him through eyes blurry with exhaustion.

"If that is true of anybody it is true of you, I suppose. Still, I think it would be best if you saw the doctor." He was a persistent bastard, as stubborn as her in almost every way.

"Maybe later. I have work to do right now." She said, the most she was willing to bend on this matter. "Legion downloaded a bunch of charts from Geth space onto the Normandy. I have a lot of reading to catch up on, the last time anyone updated a map from that area was three hundred years ago."

Thane looked as if he might say something, then as if he might do something. His hand was warm against her bare shoulder, smooth as snakeskin which she supposed made sense. At length, he dropped his hand and nodded. "As you wish."

She nodded back to him and left, heading up to her usual evening ritual. Reading charts until her eyes burned and her head ached. Push-ups then, as many as she could take, until her arms trembled and seized under her weight. As she tossed herself down on the bed, bathed in sweat, her entire body a roadmap of stress and pain she knew it was no use. Her rest was fitful and shallow. She woke two hours later, still exhausted and went to take a shower, because she had nothing else to do. There were people all around her and yet, as always, Shepard was alone.


	8. 8

The thing about dying was all the little things that changed. The largest changes, her eyes, her scars and the cybernetic heavy tissue weaves that Cerberus had used to rebuild her all came with their unique types of baggage. The scars really did not bother her overmuch, beyond the chilling memories of death they sometimes invoked. She had been covered with scars for most of her life and gotten used to it. Her tissue weaves turned out to be a blessing, making her stronger and more solid, sharpened her combat skills intensely. She had smashed a geth open from temple to temple with a fierce elbow, had taken more damage then she could have imagined and recovered with nothing more than a swab of medigel and a few long seconds huddled under cover. Although both were a constant in her life, they did not weigh on her thoughts overmuch.

Her eyes were a different matter. Yes they were strange, eerie, with their ring of orange lights encircling the lenses that had replaced her irises. They made people uncomfortable, which had been useful at times but was mostly just annoying. That was the biggest thing, the way that people reacted to them. The little things about them, however, were what made them difficult to live with. For example, she had never quite adjusted to the differentness of mechanical sight. Everything was eternally clear, edges sharply rendered and always in perfect focus. This should also have been a blessing, but when she strove to escape from the world it proved to be a curse.

Currently, the light Doctor Chakwas was shining into her eye was being projected back into her skull with such perfect clarity that she could examine the wires of the bulb; see the tiny currents of power pulsing through it as it pierced her brain like a burning spear. Her eyes watered, which was actually a relief as it softened the intensity of her sight. She could feel her jaw lock in sudden, mostly unprovoked, anger as the doctor sucked a quick intake of breath through her teeth, the sound she always made to signal intense displeasure.

"I'm a doctor, not a mechanic Commander." She sat down in her regular chair and folded her hands as her usually mild, friendly eyes bored holes in her sullen patient. "Tell me again what the problem is."

Shepard growled, running her fingers through her sweat dampened hair. She felt like she had explained this a dozen times already and her aggressive migraine was not helping her stay calm and collected. "My eyes hurt every time I try to focus on something." She reported through gritted teeth. "It's like a nail stabbing me. And these eyes are mechanical so, you know, they are ALWAYS trying to focus on something. Now, because of this, my head feels like it is about to explode."

Chakwas nodded, so calm and composed that it made Shepard squirm with impatient fury. What she would not give for a violent mercenary to gun down right now, or a firing range or a goddamn punching bag or something that she upon which could unleash the seething frustration that was consuming her mind.

"I see. And when was the last time you slept Commander?" The doctor sounded angry, more angry than Shepard had ever heard her before and her gaze snapped up, narrowing on her slim form where it reclined with counterfeit relaxation in her seat. She could see the tension in her locked jaw and the frosty depths of her usually mild eyes.

"What does that have to do with this?" Shepard snapped. This topic brought back memories of her conversation with Thane, where he had insisted she go and do just this. After that talk their comfort levels had... dropped. Their silences were no longer relaxed and natural, but full of strained emotions that neither of them apparently wanted to address. She had gone to see him once since, and retreated from the room not five minutes later, feeling hurt and confused and angry. She buried her face in her hands at the poisonous look the doctor gave her, and closed her eyes when they tried to focus on the creases of her palms. They burned behind her eyelids and her headache grew worse, pounding back and forth through her skull. "Two days ago."

"Fifty six hours, thirty seven minutes ago." EDI corrected her from the console. She shot the faceless orb a look that could have melted steel and it vanished a second later. No such luck banishing the angry doctor, however.

"Really, Commander." She sighed, getting up and heading to her medicine cabinet. She started picking through various pill bottles and vials, selecting a couple and bringing them back to the table. "And at what point did you receive the head injury that made you believe you did not need to seek medical attention after a day and a half of this?"

"It's just insomnia." Shepard moaned from the dark, protective cave her hands had made. "I can handle it."

"Yes, I can see that." Chakwas replied, coldly. "The pain in your eyes is being caused by dryness. The organic tissues aren't getting the mandatory resting period that sleep provides, and it`s dried them out so bad that the movement of your mechanical components is aggravating them. Your corneas are so red and swollen it's a miracle you can see at all."

"Yeah, lucky me." Shepard grumbled, for some reason the term 'mechanical components' had made her even more irritated. "So eye drops are going to take care of this then?"

"No, eye drops are NOT going to take care of this." Doctor Chakwas snapped, turning around abruptly with the pill bottle rattling in one hand. Shepard flinched away from the sound like it had struck her. "Sleep will take care of this. I am going to give you a weeks' worth of Tropimine and you are going to excuse yourself from duty, go to your quarters immediately and not emerge for a minimum of twelve hours or god help me I will flay you alive."

That, at least, made Shepard look up, one blood shot eye peering through her fingers as the doctor brandished the pill bottle at her as though it were a weapon. "What about 'first do no harm'?" She asked.

"Hippocrates will forgive me. I'm sure he never had to deal with anyone who was as much of a stubborn ass as you are." The doctor grumbled, marching over and shoving the bottle into her hands. "Bed. Now."

"I don't want to take medication." Shepard complained, standing up. The pressure in her head was building, stretching her eardrums so tight she could feel them pulsing in time with her heart. The world blurred and swam, like she was looking at it from underwater. The doctor raised one eyebrow in her direction, as though she had never heard that before.

"Are blinding headaches and aching eyes preferable in some way?" She asked, leaning back against her desk.

"No. Look, couldn't you just give me something to moisten my eyes? And something for the headache?" She asked, knowing it was not going to get her anywhere, but determined to try anyway. The doctor shook her head in disbelief.

"Are painkillers somehow more ethical then sleeping pills in this little world you've made yourself?" She asked.

Shepard sighed, running her fingers through her hair again and keeping her eyes closed where it was at least marginally less painful. She ran her hand down to her pounding temples as she tried to form a response that made sense, something that was excruciatingly difficult at the moment. "I don't know. Taking sleeping aids seems like it's too close to my aversion to the idea that someday I'll have to take pills to be happy. I... there are a lot of times I got really close to that. It... frightens me."

Chakwas softened at that, her posture becoming less rigid and took a step forward, putting her hand on her shoulder. Shepard sighed deeper, seeming to collapse into herself slightly, her shoulders hunching as she pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. She could feel the lenses, hard and sharp, grinding into the softer tissues around them.

"Shepard, I understand. I really do. But what you are doing right now is unhealthy, not just for yourself but for the whole crew. We're all worried about you; we're all distracted because of it. You just told Aria T'Loak to warn every criminal in the Terminus Systems that the Normandy is coming to get them, that you're going to do the impossible one more time and that nothing can stop you. If you continue on like this..." She did not finish that thought, but then she did not have to, and instead gave the shoulder of the formidable woman at her side a comforting squeeze before she pressed a bottle of eye drops into her other hand.

"These will take the swelling down and make it easier to sleep. But they aren't a cure for what's going on."

Shepard paused for a long moment and then nodded, slowly. Her slumped shoulders straightened as she inhaled deeply, trying to focus her thoughts. The doctor was right of course, just as Thane had been right, just as everyone who had recommended sleep had been right about everything. And she really could not tolerate this headache for another hour without some sort of relief.

"Okay." She said finally, uncapping the eye drops and immediately squeezing a couple drops into each eye. The relief of their cooling, soothing medicine made her eyes fill with grateful tears, they began rolling down her face as she uncapped the pill bottle and dry swallowed two of the aquamarine tablets. Chakwas smiled brightly at her, her own relief obvious.

"Now go to bed, Shepard. And I meant it, twelve hours and not a minute less." Shepard made a face at the thought of wasting that much time but knew better than to argue. "If I thought I could force you, I would say sixteen. Now go."

She went. By the time she reached the elevator she could already feel sleep tugging insistently at the back of her eyelids, making her head hang heavy on her straining neck. She would need a chiropractor to get these knots out, to loosen her shoulders and arms enough to make her ready for combat. That seemed suddenly insignificant as she moved upward, her world swimming in and out of focus for the first time she could remember since she died. Even the mechanical eyes had limits it seemed, her advancing rest overcoming their mechanical precision.

It seemed to take hours for the elevator to reach her quarters. She slumped through the door, tried vainly to kick out of her shoes on her way to the bed and almost fell down the short flight of stairs to the sunken living area. When she hit the bed, face down in a pillow, still fully clothed with one shoe hanging half-off her foot she was asleep instantly. She slept for sixteen hours.

Later, as she headed down to the mess hall for some much needed food, she had no idea which meal was closest; she could feel the intense pressure and tension already beginning to melt away. Her shoulders relaxed away from her ears, her thoughts were clearer, if slightly foggy from so much sleep, and her entire body felt less stretched, less tense. She rubbed at her eyes and yawned, her rest having provided at least some relief from the bone crushing stress of her day to day life.

"Commander! You're looking less like a zombie this morning!" Rupert called from the kitchen. Clouds of fragrant steam billowed around his reddened face as he flipped vegetable filled omelet's. She leaned over the counter inhaling deeply, as her stomach rumbled its approval. Her lack of sleep had conincided directly with an extreme loss in appetite. She felt like she hadn't eaten in weeks.

"Feel less like one too." She grinned. "So you won't need the pitchforks and torches."

"You're thinking of ogres. A shotgun will take care of a zombie just fine." Rupert replied, filling a plate with eggs cooked with sundried tomatoes and roasted peppers. Her stomach was hurting with its need and she retreated to the table where she stuffed her face silently, only nodding at the various crew members as they passed through on their way to their own breakfasts. All of them seemed glad to see her, genuinely glad. They sat around her, rather than in their own group close by like they usually did. Although she was too busy eating to pitch in, their conversation was warm and natural, flowing around her. Donnely was wrestling with Gabby, trying to headlock her and Kelly talked on and on about some vid the majority of the crew seemed to watch religiously. She was amazed to find herself relaxing in their presence, feeling somewhat at home. When she sat back, full and rested for the first time in days she found that her limitless energy had returned, making everything clear.

Of course, she had some business to take care of first. Dirty, unpleasant business that would no doubt sap the majority of this renewed energy and clarity. Shepard had to do something she absolutely hated to do, even though she knew it was conceited of her to feel that way. She had to apologize.

She readied herself outside the life support room, shaking her fingers out and smoothing the wrinkles of her uniform. Heat was building up her neck, disturbing the perfect purposeful energy running through her. It was, at this point, less about the apology itself and more about how completely stupid she felt about the way she had reacted to his concern, brushed him off like an annoyance. She had been completely out of line and he had borne it all with a serenity she did not believe had been entirely authentic. She felt like the biggest dick in the Terminus systems was the thing, and was not entirely sure how to communicate it.

"Siha." He greeted her quietly, glancing at her over his shoulder. He seemed to study her for a long moment, on the verge of saying something, and then relaxed slightly. He nodded to her usual seat and she sat, lacing her fingers together in front of her at the table to keep herself from fidgeting. A moment of silence passed as she groped for something to start the conversation with. She really should have thought this out a little better.

"I'm sorry." She said finally. Might as well start at the beginning. "I was an ass."

There was a moment of silence before she could look up and see his baffled expression. He cleared his throat after a moment and shifted slightly in his seat. His chest was no longer ensconced in bandages as the muscle tissues knit themselves back together. He looked perfectly normal, in fact, as though nothing had happened at all. She wondered how he was feeling under all that normality, but now was not the time to ask that question.

"I am not as familiar with human colloquialism as I should be. You were a what?" Her eyes shot back up to his face and she grinned like a fool, realizing what he had heard.

"Sorry." She rubbed the back of her neck, sobering slightly as she tried to find another way to say what she meant. "I meant... I was out of line. I was just..." She struggled for words. It was so hard to put herself back in that mind set now, feverish from lack of rest, all her thoughts crashing into each other.

"You were being irrational because you were too tired to think straight." Thane supplied for her, his face and voice soothing and calm. "I understood then, as I understand now. Your apology is gladly accepted."

"Oh." Shepard replied dumbly, her face blank as she absorbed that. A frown furrowed her brow after a moment, not of anger but of confusion. She quirked her lips in a fashion that made Thane smile, a blush of sudden expression across his normally stoic face. "That was... easy."

"I could force us through the awkward explanation part if you wish." Thane offered graciously and she quickly shook her head no. Again, that small smile, lingering on his full lips as he lowered his hands from their usual tent in front of him.

"I like easy. I just thought that you were... you know. Mad at me." The words limped off her tongue, feeling pathetic the moment she said them. She had been so worried that he would reject her apology after the way their comfortable relationship had fallen apart after that awkward conversation. Now after that completely reasonable response she felt like she was back in Command School, where dramatic fights had been the chief source of cheap entertainment, usually only requiring the purchase of a middling amount of alcohol.

"No, I wasn't angry." Thane shook his head slightly, something he almost never did. "But I also did not wish to be around you while you were still being... an ass." He smiled. "I like this statement. I think I'll use it more often."

"I hope I won't give you a reason to." She replied, relaxing a little as she felt a weight lift out of the room. It really was that simple, a short conversation, a few moments of uncomfortable tension and suddenly there was no more problems. They were back to being them. She could barely believe it, and ran one hand through her slowly lengthening curls as she smiled gratefully.

"I'm sure someone will." He replied and Shepard looked up at him, at the obvious pleasure shining out of his dark eyes.

"How are you feeling?" She asked, scooting forward on her seat and leaning on the table with her elbows. Thane smiled at her concern and reached out, his hand sliding over hers. It was becoming a common gesture between them and after a moment she flipped her hand over under his, touching her palm to his.

"I feel... amazing." He said, as though all other words failed him. "I am awake again, and now my life has been extended. And though I have no idea how long, and I'm not entirely sure whether Mordin does either, my breath comes without pain. Life is sweeter, and no matter what my exact time may be that alone makes all the difference."

His fingers moved against her hand, tracing the side of her thumb and the delicate tendons of her wrist. She shivered, his skin warm and smooth under her own slightly hesitant probing, softer on the underside of his wrist then his palm.

"I can tell." She replied, honestly, glancing down at their hands and then back at up at him. He was still smiling at her, though it had changed from the expression of his sudden renewal to something more playful, his dark eyes staring into hers. She was horrified to feel a blush prickling suddenly across her cheeks, darkening her dusty golden skin. To her continuing horror, he noticed.

"I continued to be baffled by human expression." He mused quietly, lifting his other hand and hesitating slightly before he touched her face. His thumb brushed the line of heat and color where it lay along her high cheekbones and it darkened slightly. "What is this called?"

"Blushing." Shepard almost blurted her answer, her stomach fluttering with that warmth, the spreading heat that was returning full force once more. She had forgotten it, along with pretty much everything else, during her long days of sleeplessness. Now, she was glad she was sitting already, unsure if her legs could be trusted to hold her up. "It happens when we're embarrassed, or uncomfortable, or nervous, pretty much all the time really, but I guess I wear a helmet a lot which is why you've never noticed before."

She realized she was babbling and closed her mouth with enough force to make her teeth click. Thane's touch lightened, as though he were on the verge of pulling away.

"Am I making you uncomfortable?" He asked quietly. The many meanings of his eyes escaped her, she could not tell exactly what he was thinking, what he wanted to hear. She shook her head slightly no.

"You're probably the only person who never makes me uncomfortable, Rama." It was the first time she had tried to drop that name into conversation and he smiled at it, his affection suddenly clear. "I'm about as nervous as I've ever been. But..." She stopped short of asking him not to stop, her mouth suddenly dry. He did not seem to need her to finish.

"I'm not sure what to do. I've been... hesitant to go on the extranet for this." He made an apprehensive face and she nodded her complete understanding. She leaned her head to the side, into his hand slightly and he ran his fingers back, into her hair and starting slightly at the unexpected texture. "I don't want to hurt you." He said softly.

"We'll figure it out." She replied. "Even if it means looking at some things that can't be unlooked."

He smiled at her, still running the thick curls gathering at the base of her neck through his curious fingers. She ran her hand further up his arm, pushing aside the leather sleeve of his jacket. The thick black patterns on his skin started to thin as they moved up toward his elbow, lines breaking away and shooting jaggedly across his muscled forearms. His hand traced the curve of her neck lightly, feeling her heartbeat and then her shoulder and down her other arm. It was intensely intimate, despite the relative chastity of the action, his deft hands and eyes picking out every miniscule reaction to his touch. As goosebumps rose along her arm he chuckled, actually chuckled, and ran the pads of his fingers across them.

"What?" She asked, tracing the forked patterns of his skin with her fingers.

"You have such a strange anatomy." He grinned. "I've never looked so closely or realized how sensitive to touch humans are. It's interesting."

"You sound like Mordin." She said, moving her hand up, across his leathered arm to the folds of warm skin that framed the vibrant red skin of his throat and neck.

"Then I am very, very sorry." He replied. He traced her elbow as she explored his neck, the hard ridges that descended down his throat and then the surprisingly soft folds of skin that she realized had no scales at all. She pressed gently, and felt firm cartilage under her fingers. Not as vulnerable as she had thought, then. She ran her hand up, across his cheeks, completely smooth under her fingers, and across his likewise immaculate forehead. Here he seemed completely without texture, protected from everything by scales like steel. She could still feel the warmth of him through all that hardness though, and slid her hand around to rest on the back of his neck.

"I guess I have some research to do." She said, a faint blush touching her cheeks again. He nodded, mute but still with that maddening smile. She dropped her hands back to the table and a moment later he did the same, running both hands down her fingers before they broke contact.

"I shall do some as well. No point in only one of us suffering through Fornax articles and," he coughed lightly into his hand, "visual aids. I shall endeavor to be more well-informed next time we speak."

She stood and hesitated a moment before folding her hands behind her back. "I'm not sure how fast I want to take this." She admitted, feeling the need to make herself clear on this one matter.

"Neither am I, Siha." Thane replied. "But it would be best to be prepared, would it not?"

She smiled, feeling another blush beginning to build and nodded before heading toward the door so he did not see it. Even without glancing over her shoulder, she doubted she had prevented anything. Thane was too damn observant for his own good. Once outside she decided to take advantage of the remainder of the full twenty four hours of leave she had taken in order to recover and head up to her room.

She had some research to do.


	9. 9

Shepard sighed, sliding another heatsink into her shotgun as bullets rattled into the stone outcrop she was using for cover. She could see Garrus crouched behind a similar formation fifteen feet to her right and he caught her eyes and made a face she vaguely recognized as disgust before miming shooting himself in the temple with one hand. She nodded and pretended to yawn, and could hear him chuckle through the translator. The barrage of bullets suddenly cut short as four people simultaneously decided to reload. Shepard made a sound of absolute disgust as she stood, whipping a ball of pulsing biotic energy out in front of her as she vaulted out of cover.

The shockwaves caught all four of their attackers, tossing them up in the air where the trio had little trouble dispatching them. Shepard sighed again, snapping her shotgun into place at the small of her back and stretching as she looked up at the ramshackle hideout their latest targets had erected. Killing pirates proved to be the most boring kind of work, the majority of them unskilled in the most basic aspects of team fighting. The general strategy seemed to be `shot bullets in one direction until things are dead` and that made their assaults little more than outright slaughter.

"EDI, what are we looking at for active hostiles?" She asked, as Jack leant to the side and spit on the ground. The arid planet of Hun was covered in fine silicone sand that stuck with astounding competency to anything damp, such as tongues and teeth. Shepard grimaced at the unpleasant sensation of it grinding around as she spoke.

"Negative, Commander. It seems that we eliminated the brunt of their organization when we attacked their vessel. This was likely only a discretionary guard force, though mech security is a possibility."

"So we can leave then?" Jack asked, obviously unimpressed by their current surroundings. A hard wind was blowing over the silicate dunes, blowing the stinging sand into them from all sides. The other woman dragged her hand over her head and the dust collecting in her buzzed hair scattered across her shoulders in a wave.

"No, I doubt these guys were set up with any sort of mech that we can't handle. We'll do a sweep for salvage and info, and signal for the shuttle when we're done." She tapped the radio to signal an end to their conversation and advanced on the doorway of the small building.

"I don't get it, Shepard." Jack complained as they made their way inside, automatically noting the squalid surroundings that typified many Terminus pirate lairs they had been attacking in the past month. She kicked over a pile of greasy dishes as they made their way through the mess hall, a room so disgusting that not even Garrus could stomach the obvious joke. Pirates were not the sort that kept a dish-washing rotar, it seemed. "We storm in here, take everything valuable, fix up their ships and just fly off to some colony and give it all away. What are you, Robin Hood?"

"I've got it figured out, Jack." Shepard replied. "You don't have to worry."

"I have to admit, I'm a little lost too Shepard." Garrus cut in as they made their way into the next room. There were terminals here, two of them, and Shepard holstered her pistol and crouched down in front of the first one, flipping open the service panel so she could access the circuit board. "I know you said you wanted to empower the people, but giving them guns and starships? Isn't that sort of..."

"Stupid?" Jack supplied helpfully.

"I know what I'm doing." Shepard insisted, cursing as the circuit board shot a couple greenish sparks past her helmet. A moment later the terminal lit up and Shepard stood, tapping at her omnitool to set up a data mine.

"Do you?"

She stopped, turning around and fixing her doubtful companions with a hard stare. Her eyes were intense, almost black but for that eternal sliver of orange lights circling her iris, like a solar eclipse. As her omnitool continued to pull streams of data from the pirates systems she put her hands on her hips and sighed. "Okay, I can see where this is going."

She went to the second terminal and began the same bypass process as she began to talk, her back to them. They did not need to see her face to know that she had her tacticians face on. It was the same face she used when she played poker, completely unreadable beyond a decisively confident intensity around the eyes and the solid, expressionless lines of her mouth. It was the face that stared down krogan and broke tight lipped mercenaries without so much as a raised hand, the one that made them follow her into the most deadly and insane situations imaginable.

"I can't control the Terminus. I'm not a government, I don't have an army, I just have one ship with a damn fine crew that can do just about anything I point it at. So the only way to unite the Terminus is to strengthen the people who want to be united. I could take the ships we attack, the money and salvage we find and strengthen my own position but that doesn't change the fact that I'm only one woman. So I'm going to take the ship we just captured and give it to the governor of Gathras in the Jorun system, because he's got a decent sized colony that's producing agricultural surplus. He's focused on economic expansion and defense, so he'll use it to expand inter-system trade, and the money that it makes him to train a garrison that will be able to defend the planet." She stopped to apply another data mine.

"Because of the wealth the new trade routes are creating, he'll suddenly have a direct interest in the success and defense of other colonies. They'll grow closer and closer, if only for the money and security unity will provide them under their new circumstances." She put her hands on her hips again, looking between the two of them. "Questions?"

"What's to stop the governor from going pirate?" Garrus asked immediately, his mandibles quivering. "That's generally what people do out here, given the slightest advantage."

"Please, Garrus. I'm giving him a ship that I acquired by storming in and killing everyone on board. The weapons I'm giving him are the ones I took off the enemies I killed, for no other reason than because I felt like it. Why risk getting horribly killed by me for money, when you could make just as much in a way that instead guarantees you my protection?" She cocked an eyebrow at him. "Would you take that risk?"

He did not need to answer that.

"Aren't you banking a lot on the general good nature of people for this, Shepard?" Jack's sceptisism was more blatant, as she made a face of general disgust at the idea. "The general good nature of the Terminus Systems?" Shepard turned to look at her, her back straight and confident, her shoulders square.

"Yes." She answered, before her omnitool dinged, alerting her to the completion of her download. She sent the data to EDI, before she drew her gun and continued advancing through the compound.

"And you don't think that's, oh I don't know, fucking INSANE?" Jack asked, exasperation lacing her voice. The garbage piles and faint acrid smell of sweat seemed to be almost everything the base contained. They must have sold off the majority of their take not long ago. "To rely on the good nature of a bunch of people renown throughout the galaxy for being a group of sour, vicious, crusty, violent assholes?"

"Saying everyone who lives in the Terminus Systems is a criminal is like saying everyone who lives in asari space isn't. There are areas of the galaxy where the people in power have different reputations, but when you go down to the lowest level of society, the lowest and largest levels, everyone is pretty much the same. They want to protect their families, have enough to eat, sleep somewhere warm, and not have to worry that some hammer is going to come smashing unexpectedly out of nowhere and crush them." She glanced over her shoulder. "I spent three years of my life as street-trash in the borders of the Terminus. I met some of the best people of my life there, people who let themselves be nothing because they didn't know there was anything better. I'm giving them something better. Something worth fighting for."

Jack gaped for a moment. "I don't know what's worse, the fact that you just said all that bullshit or the fact that you really, honestly believe it." She choked out after a moment.

Shepard turned back to the door and said nothing. The rest of the base provided little in the way of valuables, and Jack swore viciously about the waste of time while they made their way back to the shuttle pick up point. Shepard continued to say nothing, and stared silently at the horizon as they waited, her eyes pressed almost entirely closed to protect them from the waves of blowing sand. Jack approached her cautiously, her hands folded in front of her in what was the most timid posture she could ever remember seeing on the other woman.

"Shepard?" She asked, her voice was confident at least. Nothing could really keep the fire out of Jack, not even her Commander's ire.

"What is it?" Her tone was harder then she intended, and Jack bristled. Shepard shook her head, holding up a hand to stall the aggressive young woman's immediate retreat. "Sorry, sorry. I'm always so tense these days. What did you want?"

"I just... look you know I'm not good at this shit so don't expect anything fancy." Jack shoved her hands in the pockets of her baggy pants and glared at the armored figure before her. "But I feel... not good about what I said. You've never given me a reason to believe there's something you can't do, so in the end I'll be more surprised if we end up doing the logical thing."

"What's the logical thing?" Shepard asked, crossing her arms as a small smile touched her lips.

"We crash, burn and die horribly." Jack replied with a shrug. "Or get raped to death by pirates. Or get captured by slavers and spend the rest of our short lives sucking batarian dick. We should set up a pool or something."

Shepard laughed, and after a moment Jack did to. As the shuttle pulled down to the planet surface she clapped the other woman on the shoulder, her gauntlets rattling. "Put me down for five hundred credits on 'save the galaxy and live happily ever after', okay?"

"A hundred-to-one odds, Shepard." Jack grinned, as they climbed up into the small vehicle. Garrus gave them an odd look as he shook sand out of his head fringe. "If you were smart, you'd put your money on the dick-sucking. That sounds promising."

"Maybe for you." Shepard replied, which earned her a retaliating shot to the shoulder that made her entire arm go numb. They both laughed as the tiny craft began its ten minute climb through the thin atmosphere to be scooped up by the orbitting Normandy.

"You guys are weird." Garrus commented, shaking his heavy head as he looked between the two of them, which only made them laugh harder. They spent the rest of the trip up in silence, staring at the tangled nets of stars and thinking about everything that was waiting for them out there. From this distance, in silence, it seemed like they might actually manage it.

"Joker, plot a course for the Jorun system." Shepard ordered as soon as her boots struck the polished floor of the shuttle bay, tugging her helmet off. She hooked the chin guard into the convienient loop on her belt as she headed for the elevator, running her hand through the curls that had become pasted to her head with sweat. They hung damply into her eyes and she sighed, pushing them away. She needed to get this all cut off again.

"Shepard, Mordin has requested to see you as soon as possible." EDI informed her. Shepard stopped, staring up at the cieling out of habit, even though she knew there was nothing there to see.

"Did he say why?" She asked.

"He said it was concerning medical matters." The AI reported. Shepard frowned, rubbing at the back of her neck. This was worrying. What if something was wrong with Thane's implants? What if his complex lung physiology was causing some sort of unforeseen side effect? She strode briskly to the elevator and directed it to the CIC, a frown beginning to crease her forehead. But when the tech lab door whooshed open he looked unconcerned, his gaze barely wavering from his console screen.

"Shepard, was hoping you'd come by." Mordin said, looking up from his computer screen for a moment and then back down, tapping furiously. "Will only be a moment."

"Well it helps that you had EDI specifically ask me to come see you about 'medical matters'." Shepard commented, examining the unimpressive looking square of metal that seemed to be the current article of interest in the laboratory that Mordin had overtaken and now called his own. She glanced up as he shook his head and finally dropped his hands, looking disappointed. "I'm still not entirely sure what you meant by those words. Medical matters."

"Will explain. EDI informed me of your sudden interest in drell physiology. Wanted to make some recommendations as physician knowledgeable in biology of many different species." Mordin began to circle around the work table as Shepard stood up straight, her face twisted into a mask of absolute horror. "No need to look so concerned Shepard, recommendations strictly on a patient-doctor level. No need to attach negative feelings of embarrassment because of intimacy of topic."

"Understand you have been consulting Fornax magazines' extranet site for information. Inadvisable, hardly a reputed publication, much of the content designed to spike hormone levels rather than properly inform, though video archives you have already accessed should provide firm understanding of the mechanics of things, it would be unwise to proceed without more in-depth data." Mordin typed at his omnitool, scrolling through the information.

"Mordin?" Shepard rasped, her voice higher than usual as though she were trying to stop herself from screaming. Really, she was trying to stop herself from throwing Mordin and possibly herself through the nearest airlock. Probably EDI too. Somehow.

"Yes, Shepard?" The salarian chirped, not looking up from his omnitool.

"We need to talk about boundaries. Actually, what we probably need is to never speak, ever again. Or at least you need to never speak." She pinched at the bridge of her nose, taking deep breaths to steady herself. She had woken up this morning feeling so great, at least compared to how she could remember feeling since her sixteen hour nap.

"No need to be so uncomfortable! Simply wish to advise of possible complications and offer advice. Prolonged contact may cause rash, also be advised that reaction coupled with your cybernetic skin weaves may have unforeseen side effects. Also, drell saliva contains compound found to be psychotropic in most humans. Be prepared." He smiled innocently up at her. She supposed, since salarians had no hormonal drives and therefore no real concept of the sort of intimacy that surrounded the act of mating, he really was not trying to make her so uncomfortable, but that did not stop her from wishing the floor would open up suddenly and swallow her whole.

"Can provide soothing ointments if needed, also possibly something to counteract effects of saliva exchange if effects prove too intense. Will be hard to avoid, understand that use of tongue is crucial in the mating habits of drell." Was he winking at her? No, no, no, this was too weird. She had to leave before her nose started bleeding.

"Thanks for the information Mordin. You probably don't want to have this conversation with Thane, okay?" She said, slowly making her way into a position where she could sprint for the door. Anything to get away from... whatever this was. The most awkward five minutes of her life, most assuredly.

"Already have, Shepard. Thane was a great deal more relaxed." Mordin replied. "Even though it's much more complicated for him, bigger changes."

Shepard bit back her curiosity at THAT little comment. However drell women differed from human ones, beyond the obvious ways she had found, she was pretty sure she did not want to hear about them from Mordin. She continued her steady retreat and Mordin waved to her as she turned to flee back to the relative sanity of the rest of the ship. She was pretty sure she never wanted to see this room again, after that little exchange.

"Enjoy yourself Shepard!" Mordin called after her. She waved one hand in vague goodbye, not turning or looking at him in any way. She straightened slightly as she made her way onto the command deck, nodding at a few crewmen as they made their way back and forth down the halls. She felt like everyone was in on the joke, tossing her scandalous looks, and shook her head. It was just left over insanity from the conversation she had just escaped.

Shepard headed for the elevator, tapping at her omnitool in her lingering curiosity. The extranet was terrifying at times, especially when the topic of sex was at hand, but she managed to find a site that did not look like porn. Or at least it did not look like it was too terribly graphic porn. As she scanned the columns of data and the very informative diagrams provided she realized exactly what Mordin had been talking about.

Half an hour orgasms? She felt her eyes widen, eyebrows disappearing behind the thick fall of bangs across her forehead. These people did not mess around when it came to fucking. The average drell love session, complete with their typically extensive foreplay, usually totaled at three hours. Three hours! And despite the fact they had no clitoris or nipples the bitches orgasmed for thirty goddamn minutes! She could barely imagine what that would feel like.

It must be odd for him indeed, she thought as she climbed into the elevator. It seemed like drell women were more different then she thought, whereas all the vids she had watched, most of them cringeworthy some of them... not so bad, suggested that beyond a few negligent differences drell men were fairly similar to human ones. So where did that leave her and Thane? Was he weirded out by the knowledge of how different she would be under her clothes? How separate she was from what he knew, what he no doubt found desirable?

She reached her quarters and immediately began to strip out of her armor, peeling the many layers of reinforced metal, mesh and padding off until she stood naked save for a combat bra and underwear in the centre of her room. She kicked her discarded armaments into a relatively contained pile and headed for the bathroom. She resisted the urge to examine all her flaws in the mirror and took a long steaming hot shower instead, during which she brushed her teeth three times, until the foam she spat stopped looking brown. Satisfied with her cleanliness she dressed herself in her usual listless black pants and shirt and sat down to go over the information she had mined out of the pirates computers.

Most of it was junk, like she had expected, but there were a few promising leads, most notably, a rivalry with another gang of similar thugs a few systems over. Apparently, they had been quarreling over pillage rights to a few colonies in the area, neither of them brave enough to make a committed assault on the other. She pulled up more star charts, more planetary stats and colony brochures to begin the plans for their next movement. It was a slow way to start, but she knew she just had to get the ball rolling, just get some momentum going and she would be able to do great things.

At least, she thought she knew. The doubt she had heard in Jack's voice still festered, like a splinter in her mind. She found herself wondering if her faith in the fundamental decency and really, survival instinct of people was misplaced. Plenty of people in life had given her plenty of reasons to doubt. But plenty of others had given her reasons to believe.

Standing, she abandoned her work. There would be plenty of time for it later, as they charted a course to the disputed colonies and continued the purge. She made her way out the door, toward the elevator. She had long ago accepted that as an XO she would have to do lots and lots of desk work, but that did not mean she had to like it. She had earned the right to procrastinate a little bit, go have a bite to eat and maybe make plans to play Skyllian Five with Donnely and Daniels again. She had enjoyed that.

When she got to deck three, she already knew where she was going, despite her attempts to decieve herself in the elevator. Thane looked up at her as she entered, from his seat on the small cot he had set up in the room. She realized he was bare-chested and her eyes immediately dropped to his muscled torso, knowing what she would find from the vids she had subjected herself to but still shocked by exactly how vibrant drell markings were.

He jumped up, shielding his mid rift with both hands. She looked up at his face, one eyebrow quirked in question.

"No need to look so bashful." She chided. "I've seen stomachs before. Even drell stomachs. Now." She made a face as a few particularly vivid memories of certain less savoury vids sprang to mind and Thane cleared his throat, still covering the lower half of his stomach, just what poked up above the waist of his pants.

"Ah, Siha. It is considered very, shall we say, intimate for a drell to show their abdomen to someone. Something along the lines of how human women treat their breasts." She knew drell did not blush but she could have sworn that, had Thane the capacity for it, he would have been. She jumped, realizing exactly how invasive her staring had been and turned her back on him to preserve what remained of his modesty. Not much. She had seen enough, the way the dark lines along his arms twisted down, off his shoulders, along the side of his pectorals and down, twisting together as they descended under his waist band. And the two little strips of red, darker than his throat, almost like blood, that flanked the black. She could not help but peek discreetly over her shoulder as he pulled his shirt on, noting the continuation of the forked, lightning-shaped patterns from his arms, shooting across his rib cage.

"Have you ever considered locking the door when you change?" She asked conversationally as she turned around. Thane sighed, running one hand over his scaled head, and shrugged helplessly.

"I thought I had. I was... distracted at the time." He confessed, pulling on his jacket. Shepard was sad to see the muscular arms and their many jagged patterns disappear, but was more focused on what he had said. She narrowed her eyes slyly at him.

"Mordin?" She asked. He nodded, folding his hands behind his back.

"He was... excessively helpful. And somewhat disconcerting." His discomfort was obvious and Shepard felt the playful grin fall off her face. Maybe he really had been discouraged by the differences between them; maybe he did not want to do this anymore. He caught her eye and seemed to realize what she was thinking because he took a step forward, catching one of her hands in his.

"I don't mean... it was just a lot to take in all at once." He smiled reassuringly at her. "Especially from such a source as that. When he started talking about orgasm..." He shut his eyes and shuddered. "There are a great many things I thought about doing in order to make him stop talking. It is unfortunate I shall never be able to forget that conversation."

She laughed, and cupped her hand over her mouth. "You and me both, I might not have perfect memory but that stuff is going to haunt my dreams." She sobered slightly, thoughts of what really did haunt her dreams pressing too near for a moment. She took his other hand in an effort to distract herself. "So we're still..."

He nodded, his hands warm around hers as he drew her closer, closing the chaste distance between them. She could feel herself bump up against him, the movement of his breath against her clear and strong. She could smell the faint aroma of leather, spice and drell skin, dry and slightly musty but not at all unpleasant. She wondered what he thought of her scent, of shampoo and hair and the sudden nervous sweat that had broken out across the back of her neck.

"If you want us to be." He said quietly, one hand leaving hers and settling instead on her waist. "The last time I asked you said you were unsure."

"I still am. Kind of. I know I want this, that I want you. I just don't know if we can make it work." Her thoughts were short circuiting, random doubts and inhibitions flying out of her mouth as she struggled to put herself back in control. His dark eyes were on hers, warm, inviting as the flesh that was pressing up against her. "We're so different. And there's so much going on, all around us, in between us all the time. That doesn't leave a lot of room for relationships, believe me I've tried it."

He nodded again. "This is all very true. We can stop this now, if you wish." His voice was very soft, because he was very close all of a sudden, his hand on the small of her back as the other slid up her arm to touch her hair again as he smiled. She hesitated, doubt tormenting her. She did not want to hurt him, she did not want to be hurt. All their flirting and playful looks had seemed so innocent even though they had both known it was leading up to this. She felt unprepared to make this decision, she did not have enough information to make a fully thought out, reasonable choice about what was right.

So she went with her gut, and kissed him. He stiffened for a moment, and then relaxed almost instantly as her arms slid slowly over his shoulders and she felt his hand at the back of her neck soften; almost cradling her head with gentleness she was unaccustomed to. She was often shocked to realize how much time had passed, those two years of death having been fleeting at best, and she had one of those moments then as they pressed suddenly together. It was like a dam letting go in her chest, flooding her body with forgotten sensations. The warm softness of lips, the beating of another heart passing into her chest, the strength of his hands moving across her body, she felt them all as though they were new. They were, in a way. This flesh, this newly grown, Cerberus-advanced flesh, had never felt the touch of a lover; never felt the kind of intimacy that invaded the moment.

After what felt like too short a time they broke away, and Shepard felt a shiver wrack her spine at the ghostly warmth his lips left against hers. She opened her eyes and he was smiling at her, warmly. She smiled back.

"Are you going to tell me what Siha means?" She asked, suddenly. He looked surprised for a moment, and then narrowed his eyes at her.

"Are you going to tell me what Rama means?" He replied, one brow arched in challenge. She shook her head and his face assumed a stubborn expression. "I think you know what my answer will be."

"No fair." Shepard complained. "You should have to tell first. You started this."

"Patience is a virtue, Siha." He pronounced the word with almost a purr, rumbling it through his chest and making her shiver all over again. Now she really wanted to know what it meant, which had of course been his plan all along.

"Fine." She wrinkled her nose at him and slipped out of his grip. "I have to get going anyway; I have some armour mods I wanted to talk to Jacob about, the exchange of a starship to negotiate, and a planetary garrison to found. Busy, busy, busy." She had been walking backwards toward the door, never breaking eye contact with him. "I'll be back later."

"Not too much later, I hope." He commented as she stepped through the door. She waited until it was closed to lean back against the opposite wall, breathing deeply. Things had just gotten a lot more complicated, she had added a hundred potential distractions and causes for mistakes to her life and it was probably, in the long run, a bad idea all together.

But damn, could the man ever kiss.


	10. 10

A\N: After re-reading the last few paragraphs I decided I was really unhappy with them and cleaned them up a bit. Serves me right for rushing to get the chapter up before I went to work. In short, you will learn nothing new from this re-posting, it`s just for my pride and because I left the `r`out of shirt a couple times and couldn`t let that lie.

----

"Commander, new information has been found in relation to the pirates you were planning on targeting in the adjacent systems." EDI's monotonous synthetic voice was actually a welcome break to the circling conversation she had been having with the governor of the turian Gathras colony. She held up a hand and excused herself for a moment so she could retreat into a corner and speak more freely.

"What is it?" She asked, smiling in what she hoped was a comforting way as the mayor continued to squint suspiciously at her. She had gotten used to it, since it was the first reaction most people had upon learning who she was. People in the Terminus Systems hated the Alliance on principle, but none more so than turians. She had brought Garrus along as a show of diversity, but the governor had thus far gone to almost every length to ignore his presence entirely.

"It seems the group we disbanded had managed to pinpoint their base of operations. They were enroute to attack them when we boarded their ship." EDI informed her patiently.

"That was their invasion force?" Shepard asked, laughing quietly. "Amateurs."

"Quite. It is the location of the base that is of concern, Shepard." EDI paused, maybe even hesitated, for the briefest of moments. "It is located on Mindoir."

The world froze for a second, and then she was back, purposeful. She shifted her weight, her entire body suddenly tense and she could hear a distant melody in the back of her thoughts, shifting when she tried to focus on it. The sound of her armour grinding as she moved sent a tremor of frustration shooting through the centre of her brain.

"Commander?" EDI asked.

"Prepare to chart a course after we return on the shuttle." She ordered. Pirates were pirates, no matter where they happened to make buff. She would have to kill them sooner or later. She would have to face that planet even, eventually, since it was the most strategically advantageous system in the surrounding area. But she would have preferred later. Much, much later. Tapping her radio to signal the end of the conversation she strode back to governor Vysery, who was currently staring out the picture windows of his office at the main road of his colony.

"Tell me what your game is, Shepard." He said, not turning around. "If you're straight with me maybe we can work something out."

"I'm being straight with you, Vysery." She replied, leaning against his desk and crossing her legs at the ankles. "No game. All I want to do is help."

"An Alliance veteran human Spectre wants to help colonies in the fringes of Terminus space expand out of the goodness of her heart? You expect me to believe that?" His mandibles flared in his anger and he glared over his shoulder at her. "Do you think I'm a fool?"

"Look at what I'm offering you." Shepard replied, standing up and moving around to the opposite side of his desk, running her hand over the smooth polish of its wood. It was something native to the planet, almost navy blue in color with bold, elaborate black grain. He turned away from the window and placed both hands on his desk as she faced him, hands folded behind her back. "A sizable freighter, quick and clean with plenty of hull space. Your colony is over-producing because your planet is so damn bountiful, and this ship could expand your ability to trade over enormous distances. You could make a lot of money." She saw his mandibles twitch visibly. "And I'm also going to give you enough weapons and armour to outfit a garrison to defend this new wealth. You must have some people on this world who know how to fight, or at least some that could learn to. I'm offering you money and security, with no strings attached."

"See, that's the part where you lose me. I can't believe you want to just give this to me and walk away." He said, his intense interest once more overshadowed by his suspicion. "Nothing is ever free."

"I don't want to just walk away though. I want to give you this handy communicator." She presented it in one hand. "That provides a secure channel to the Normandy. If a new group of pirates moves into the neighborhood and thinks they can pick up where the last bunch left off, I want you to call me. Then I'll come back and kill them for you. You should also be aware that I've already given similar communicators to neighboring colonies in these systems. Should this ship be seen pirating again for some reason, I've assured them I'll take care of the problem."

He continued to glare at her and slammed one hand on the desk after a tense moment. "Just tell me WHY damn you!" His poker face was gone, he was truly angry now. Garrus and Jack tensed, hands going to weapons. Shepard waved them off and they relaxed, if only slightly, and turned away again.

"You know why. Don't tell me you haven't seen the vids. The Reapers are coming, the same as they've been coming for the past two years. The Terminus Systems are weak right now, they're being controlled by weak cowards because they have more bullets than everyone else. If the Reapers arrive tomorrow, we're all dead. I need the Terminus Systems to be strong, and I'm not going to find that strength in the slimy, greedy, back-stabbing criminal filth that thinks it can run this place." Her voice flared, going up an octave in passion. She was accustomed to giving speeches, when she thought they would be effective. Vysery, with his impassioned desk hitting and stoic window gazing obviously possessed a flair for the dramatic, and they stared each other in the eyes for a moment before Vysery eased himself slowly into his chair. After a moment, she took one of the pair that were pulled up facing him.

"Soverign and the Citadel? That was just a taste of what's coming. The first touches of a war that is going to be bigger and more brutal than anything this galaxy has ever seen before." She crossed her arms and adjusted her seat. "Unless we unite there's no way we can win this."

"Unite? The Terminus Systems?" Vysery's small eyes widened and he sat back, rubbing the space between his eyes so hard that it smeared the triangle of dark blue face paint he wore there. "It'll never work."

"What have you got to lose? Is the way things are now really all that great?" She lifted one hand and pointed through the window at the darkening sky. The setting sun shimmered orange and red, a few small clouds painted in dark maroon where they hugged the horizon. "At any moment pirates could drop from the sky and take everything you love or value, like they've been doing your entire life. What I'm offering, really offering, is a way out of this cycle."

The turian was silent for a long moment, staring at his talons where they lay, interlocked on his desk. After what seemed like a distant silence he looked up, meeting her eyes again. His stare was full of suspicion as it examined her stoic, unflinching face, met the backlit blackness of her unyielding eyes. Finally he nodded, only slightly.

"Let's say I believed you." He said. "What do we do next?"

She smiled.

Hours later, after much file sharing and helping the steadily relaxing governor with the basic schematics for setting up an effective garrison and even moderating the forging of a trade agreement with the nearest large colony Shepard dragged herself down the shuttle ramp and toward the elevator, waving to Jack and Garrus who were beginning to look equally as weary. Her brain was like putty, a jumble of trade language and gun drills and legal jargon, glowing with hope at how well everything had gone but incapable of forming complete thoughts. She almost dozed off as the elevator lifted them smoothly up a floor, jolting fully awake again as it stopped to let Garrus off on the crew deck. She had not been tired until the moment she sat down on the shuttle to make her way back up to the Normandy but now she could barely keep her eyes open. Maybe for the first time in days she could sleep without the help of those blasted blue pills that she resented so much.

"ETA 27 hours, 12 minutes, Commander." EDI's cool voice informed her. She looked up, as was her habit, red rimmed eyes blurry with confusion.

"ETA?" She asked, rubbing at the hump of her broken nose and squeezing her eyes shut.

"To Mindoir, Commander." Came the reply. She hissed a sharp intake of breath through her teeth and pounded one fist into the wall of the elevator. She had completely forgotten about that, been too focused on her talk with Vysery and filed it away in the back of her mind. It had been nicer to have it there, and she sighed heavily. All hopes of natural sleep were gone from her now, as the sound in the back of her head grew stronger, a distant tolling from the depths of her memory.

"Thanks, EDI. I'm going to try and get some sleep. Try not to wake me for anything less than the ship being on fire." She had found that it was impossible to do anything for at least ten hours after she popped those pills. Trying to grab a quick six hours and get back to work was impossible. Sometimes she slept so much that she just wound up being tired again, but the alternative was still a fresh blister of pain in her memories and she had no other options.

The small familiar room that awaited her seemed strangely sterile as she pushed her way into it. Over the years she had gotten used to living on ships, it seemed strange to her to walk around on land where the ceilings were so high and the layout of houses and apartments seemed so counterproductive. Today though, she felt like she needed to duck her head, the walls pressed uncomfortably close and as she collapsed onto her bed and began to strip out of her armor she realized her fish were dead. And she had been doing such a good job with these ones too.

Sighing, she leant up and got the net to scoop the tiny orange bodies out. She could not go back to that store and face that smug asari's depreciating looks when she admitted she had killed another batch. This was the end of Shepard's adventures into pet ownership. She had not been able to convince herself to buy a hamster, which actually felt like an animal rather than an ornament she had to feed occasionally when she could not even keep said ornaments alive. After a moment of silence over the toilet bowl, she bid adieu to her fish and popped her sleeping pill before changing into a clean t-shirt and underwear. By the time she made it back to the bed and lay down on her back she could already feel the heaviness of artificial sleep tugging on her eyelids. Here where it was so quiet, so still, in the last moments between darkness and light the sound that had haunted her since EDI first called down to the planet intensified, filling her mind.

Like she had a thousand times in her life before the batarians came, Shepard fell asleep listening to the bells ringing in the high hills of Mindoir.

Hours later, she woke suddenly from the dark, senseless oblivion of medicated rest. She had felt, rather than heard the presence of another being in her quarters; a whisper that touched her mind and brought reality smashing through her blurry eyes as she sat up suddenly. The figure silhouetted by the dim light of the fish tanks turned suddenly to look at her.

"Siha, I'm sorry. I did not mean to wake you." Thane apologized, hesitating at the top of the flight of stairs that led down into her sleeping quarters. She squinted at him through the haze of recent sleep and pills and after a long moment gestured him down. She kept the sheets folded over the mostly naked lower half of her body as she sat straighter, folding one slender hand over her face and trying to pull her addled thoughts together into a working mind. She heard him descend the stairs and when she looked up he was standing beside the bed, looking down at her.

"Did you need something?" She asked, mimicking his regular greeting. He smiled and shook his head no, and she realized he was once again giving her his searching, all-knowing look, peeling away all her bluffs and false confidence to see her as she really was.

"I thought you might." He said, sitting down on the bed beside her. His dark eyes were intense and she looked away, not able to handle their scrutiny in her current state. He looked down, and covered her hand on the bed with his.

"Because of Mindoir?" She asked. She saw him nod out of the corner of her eye and sighed. "I can't really talk about it right now. I took some sleep aids," she glanced at her clock, "four hours ago, so I'm pretty much useless for another six. I can barely keep my eyes open as I speak." She emphasized her point with an enormous yawn.

"I see." Thane seemed to hesitate, unsure of what exactly to do. She supposed he was not anymore used to this awkward dance of concern and protocol then she was, and after a moment she gripped his hand and drew him further onto the bed.

"I could use some company though. Just until I fall asleep." In her scarcely lucid, doped state all her usual hesitations and doubts lagged far behind action. She folded herself against his side, under one of his arms, as he leant back against her pillow. She closed her eyes and eased into the gentle rhythm of his heart beat, the steady rise and fall of his chest. After a moment she felt him relax and his hand settled itself in her hair, stroking softly.

"Why did you cut all your hair off?" He asked, his fingers settling on the base of her spine and kneading at the tension bunched there. She sighed against the sweet-smelling leather covering his chest, her mind slipping steadily away. It took her quite a few seconds to assemble anything close to an intelligible response.

"I didn't want people to recognize me. It was... uncomfortable. Walking down the streets and having everyone think that they know me, either as the Savior of the Citadel or that other thing they call me. The Butcher of Torfan." She grit her teeth. "Mostly as the other thing. People thought... they thought a lot of... of things about me."

She wanted to elaborate on that thought but sleep was proving too powerful. Bathed in the warm, sweet scent of his skin she slipped into darkness again, feeling the strong, unfaltering rise and fall of his chest and the sensation of his fingers moving through her hair.

She woke, hours later though it felt like moments, and looked around her darkened room. The barren fish tanks bathed the sleek, emotionless furniture with soft shades of blue and the twinkling lights beyond her windows frosted the effect, making her shiver even in the comfortable warmth of her bed. She had spent much of her life on ships and had never really thought about getting spaced except during a few delirious and brutal ship-to-ship battles. What was out there was frozen and deadly, she had always known that. But now the knowledge combined with the reality of what she had experienced haunted her. She often wished for a drab, windowless room that did not do so much to remind her of what it had been like to hang suspended in all that space.

Thane was gone, of course, and she pulled herself out of bed with no mind to her state of undress. Sauntering into the bathroom she paused in front of the sink to gargle a glass of water and brush her teeth. The sleeping pills gave her the most awful dry mouth in the mornings, as well as itchy red blotches across the underside of her jaw. She scratched at them absently as she undressed and took a shower, turning the water hot then cold to try and shake off the last persistent memories of sleep. She turned off the water and shook the bulk of it from her hair as her thoughts began to wander back to the issue at hand.

It was time to face the reality of this. It was another sixteen hours and four minutes until the Normandy would pass into orbit around the planet of Mindoir and she had to accept that. There would be no complications, she would go down there and kill some pirates, then raid their base, get EDI to perform a geographical scan for tactical files and sail away. She could handle that, it was something she had done a several times in the past six weeks alone. The way she felt about Mindoir was not rooted in the stone and trees, it was rooted in god, death, rebirth and enlightenment. Mindoir represented all of these things to her, but going there was not going to change the way she felt about them. Only she had the power to do that.

She knew all of this, understood all of it. So why was she standing stock still in the shower trembling like this? Why did the thought of distant mountains, blurring in the purple mists of dawn send a chill of pure terror down her spine? Why were these bells still pounding their rhythms in the back of her brain, filling her perfect clarity with obscuring vibrations? She was almost dry as she left the shower and walked, naked, into her quarters again. The woman she glimpsed in the mirror as she passed was not her reflection and it made her jump a little, as it always did.

She pulled on a featureless black shirt without bothering with a bra, and then a pair of black pants. They were the only clothes she owned outside her armor, and when she started counting that as an outfit she knew she was really in trouble. As she looked out at the wide expanse of the universe unrolling through her windows she wondered what would happen if she could not take this, if the stress and pressure finally got to her and she cracked. Would it really make a difference? She had accepted, within her dying thoughts, that she was not special. That nothing had determined what would happen, what she would and could become. This had both simplified and complicated her outlook on life. It suggested that she could do anything, but it also suggested that she could fail at anything just as readily.

She was not accustomed to confronting the possibility that she could actually fail at anything. As the people around her had heaped their hopes and dreams on her, convinced themselves that there was nothing she could not do, so had she come to expect those heroics of herself. She had let their confidence build her own. That confidence had led her here, to this impossible task that she was planning to undertake. And now they were beginning to doubt her, thinking that what she was doing was too big, too ambitious. She did not know how to feel about that.

And than there was Mindoir.

Sighing angrily, Shepard sat down on the edge of her bed and put her head in her hands. She remembered, vaguely, a time when everything had been clear. When she had understood her place in the universe with such absolute clarity it bordered on fanaticism. She could have used that intensity of purpose now, when everything seemed so unclear. She was still sitting there, staring at the floor between her feet when she heard the door whoosh open and the increasingly familiar figure of her drell... whatever he was entered the room.

"Siha. How did you sleep?" He asked, descending the little flight of stairs past her model ships without being beckoned or invited. She should have known he would be back up here, and even though she normally would have desperately wanted to be alone at a time when she felt so conflicted and unsure she found herself smiling and moving over slightly, patting the bed beside her.

"About as well as I ever do, now that I'm experiencing better living through chemistry." She commented wryly. The oblivion of prescribed sleep was unsettling, both for how empty it seemed and how easy it was. Pop a few tablets and all the nightmares melt away, even if those nightmares were the most vicious and ugly of truths dredged up from the past. "Too hard, too long and too deep. But it's better than my alternative, I suppose."

He nodded silently at her assessment, staring at her newly vacant fish tanks as he thought. After a moment he pulled her hand onto his lap, cupping it between both of his. His conjoined middle and ring finger traced the hills and valleys of her knuckles. "Do you want to talk now?" He asked quietly. She sighed and shook her head.

"Not really." She confessed. "I don't know what to say about it now anymore than I did before. I just want to get down there, kill all the pirates and get off."

"Are you still dreaming about the attack?" He asked quietly, continuing to trace the contours of her hand even though his wide black eyes were fixed on her. Rather than the usual intense scrutiny of such personal conversations, his expression was soft, caring. She could not remember the last time someone had looked at her like that, like she was the one that needed support, needed someone to understand. She did not remember the last time someone had worried about her in the fashion that Thane did, not just after her health or efficiency or happiness but after the state of her soul, the very deepest parts of her.

"I don't dream at all anymore." Shepard replied softly. "The pills took care of everything, it seems. Just like everyone promised they would." She could not keep the bitterness out of her voice, her disgust with herself for being so weak as to need to drug herself into contentment. Thane's grip tightened on her hand and she looked up at him.

"This is not like you." He said softly. She frowned, suddenly weary again. She could feel her eyes throbbing dully as though she had not spent the last several hours sleeping and doing generally nothing. She shrugged helplessly.

"Do you really think you know who I am?" She asked, looking up at him. Her tone was soft, lost and full of the many different fears she had been given plenty of time to think over and line out for herself. "I've only known you for a few months. That's not a lot of time to learn the deepest levels of someone's soul, and I haven't exactly been open about... certain things."

"I barely know anything about who you were before you walked into the Dantius Towers on Ilium with a mind to recruit me." Thane confirmed. "You have ever kept the secrets of your past close, never daring to share them with anyone. I know only the woman that you are now, in this room, as evidenced by everything I have seen you do. I believe you are on the right path Shepard, I believe you can do everything you're saying you can do and more. You have nothing to fear from yourself."

She stared at him, wondering how he knew exactly all the things she needed to hear, how anyone could hold such feverish faith in her when she had none in herself. The dumb bastard really did believe everything he was saying to, she could see it reflected in the depths of his dark eyes. She smiled, shaking her head slightly in wonder until her long bangs sagged suddenly into her eyes. He brushed them away with one hand, trailing his fingers along the smooth line of her forehead and down her cheek.

"Rama, I don't know if you're feeling up to it, and if you aren't you should feel free to say so." She said finally, as his fingers traced her jaw line. As his touch lightened she raised one hand to hold in there, warm against her cheek. "But it would be really great if you could... if you could come on this mission with me. I might need someone there who understands at least some of what is going on. Someone who can keep me on the right track if I... lose my way."

He nodded as though she did not need to ask and she smiled. They had not been on a mission together since he had gotten his implants, since all the medical personnel had allied with her to force him to take the fully recommended healing time. She missed working with him, missed the easy way they complimented each other's strengths and weaknesses. For someone who had spent the majority of his career working alone, Thane had a remarkable knack for keeping her alive when she decided to charge into the mouth of hell, spraying bullets and biotics in every direction. "I should go prepare."

"You are prepared." Shepard teased. "Are you telling me the great Thane Krios lets his guns get dusty? Even if they are, we've got like fifteen hours. Can't you think of better ways to spend the next little while?"

He smiled at her, his expression changing as quickly as the mood in the room did. She was not over Mindoir, as much as she would have liked to claim otherwise. She was not over Mindoir, she was not sure she believed in herself, she was not sure that they could beat the Reapers with the insane plans she had concocted. But Thane was, and for the moment that was enough to alleviate the crushing doubt and uncertainty. He shifted closer to her on the bed, their thighs suddenly pressed against each other from knee to hip. "What were you thinking, exactly?"

She turned her head slightly, against his hand and kissed the side of his callused thumb before flicking her tongue out briefly and sliding it along the sensitive underside of the digit. Drell were insensitive to touch across their scaly areas, but anywhere the scales parted tended to be particularly receptive as a result. His eyes widened slightly at the quick, wet heat of her tongue and she raised one eyebrow at him.

"I thought you didn't want to go fast." He said quietly, and she could hear the note of restraint trembling in his voice, feel his grip tighten on her ever so slightly as her eyes grew more and more wicked. He had the same bashful expression on his face he had borne when she walked in on him shirtless, the closest thing to uncertainty she ever saw on him.

"We don't have to go far. I just want to... get to know you better. The vids gave me an idea of what to expect, but nothing compares to field research." She slid her arms around his neck and pressed herself against his chest. She still was not wearing any undergarments and she could feel him react to the fact, his eyes shifting suddenly down. She took advantage of his distraction to haul herself suddenly into his lap, one knee on either side of his hips.

He jumped, looking up at her as she pressed close again, her hands curling up behind his head, probing the ridges of his scales to find the thin, soft lines of skin at their joints. He sighed, a rush of warm air against her ear and his hands went to her hips, gently, barely there at first, then gaining confidence as she began to kiss down the red fold of skin on his cheek. When she reached his jaw and ducked under the hard line of his jawbone to skate her tongue along the first folds of his completely scale-less throat he jumped again, and sighed again, his hands beginning to wander along the long, powerful muscles of her thighs and up her strong back to circle her waist, steadily gaining confidence at her own soft sighs of encouragement. When she paused, glancing up to see what kind of faces he was making, he turned his head and caught her lips in a kiss.

She remembered what Mordin had said about drell using their tongues, and opened her mouth as his slid along the seam of her lips. He darted in immediately, testing the texture of her tiny porcelain teeth and the curious dimples scattered across the roof of her mouth. She reciprocated and found the inside of the drell mouth as smooth as the outside, with their four large teeth on top and bottom and smooth, unbroken pallet. There was a faint sweet taste to him, almost citrus in nature, but sharper and with a hint of exotic spice as always. Her thighs tightened around his hips as she felt him grip her suddenly tight, her fingers continued to trace the sensitive tracks of skin along the ridges of his scales. As their kiss continued to deepen he pulled her hips down flat onto his lap, wrapping his arms around her waist and holding her flush against him.

When their lips parted they both drew a quick breath and stared at each other. She squinted slightly as her vision blurred, the details of her surroundings glowing and expanding in the corners of her eyes. Everything was suddenly slightly unreal, except him. He was the only solid thing, so close she could see herself reflected in his glossy black eyes. She thought back to Mordin`s warning about those psychotropic effects, and wondered how quickly they would set in for a second before she felt his weight shift under her and suddenly she was on her back on the bed as Thane moved over her, his tongue doing amazing things down the curve of her ear before he nipped lightly on the lobe and began to trail smooth, damp kisses down her neck. She sighed, closing her eyes and relaxing back against the smooth sheets, her body relaxing even as he set every nerve on fire. His incredible, agile tongue twisted its way across her throat, finding every sensitive spot and exploiting it mercilessly, his pleasure apparent every time she gasped or moaned involuntarily.

She stretched her arms out above her head and sighed again as he latched onto the base of her neck, just above the collar of her shirt and nipped the skin, kissed it with his soft lips and took deep, shuddering breaths of her scent. As he pulled back slightly, she took the opportunity to slide her hands under the collar of his jacket, tracing the strangely solid line of his thick collar bone, taking in every delicious change in the many textures of his skin.

There was no way to tell how long it went on like that, touching, kissing and staring into each other's eyes with none of the awkward whispering that usually accompanied the act of exploring a new lover, especially one of a different species. The world was definitely breathing around them now, the light from the fish tank flowing across the floor, the stars above him filtering down through the window like a snow fall of glowing sparks. She felt like she could reach out and touch them, had she not been so busy nuzzling her face against Thane's neck as he pulled her shirt down her shoulder a little ways, exposing a new patch of skin to explore. She felt his other hand moving up her stomach from where it had been tracing small circles through the thin fabric of her shirt, hesitating as it neared her breast and arched her back invitingly into his touch. He took her invitation and she felt his hand close over her. His lips left her neck and she glanced down to see he was staring at his hand as he felt her up.

"What?" She asked, one eyebrow raised at the curious expression on his face. Breasts were new to him of course, and he seemed to be suddenly very interested in them, his brows knit in an expression she could not read. She definitely wanted to know what he thought about his introduction to what seemed to her an indispensible feature of femaleness.

"They're... soft." He remarked quietly, looking back up at her as a grin broke across his face. "I never expected any part of you to be so soft."

She laughed, feeling incredibly mellow all of a sudden and pulled him down to her, sliding her tongue into his inviting mouth. He was a quick study despite his initial hesitation, and she soon felt his fingers tease the rapidly hardening bud of her nipple through the light cotton. She broke their kiss to suck in a quick breath of air and he stopped, watching her reaction intently. His fingers moved again and she felt a light blush of color spread across her cheeks as her core suddenly tightened, the flood of heat that had plagued her for what felt like eons breaking over her with sudden and incredible intensity. Again he teased her and she gasped a loud, putting one hand over his to stop him.

"That's..." She began, her voice hitching in her throat, and he let his hand drop away in instant understanding. He kissed her cheeks, the tinge of darkness her arousal had spread across them, and nuzzled into her neck as she wrapped her arms around him and they stayed like that for a few long moments, not moving or talking. The world swam so actively around her that Shepard had to close her eyes and curl around him to keep herself grounded, the warmth of him all that was real and solid in the shifting, melting colors of the world.

"Siha, whatever happens on Mindoir, I will do all I can to keep you on the right track." He whispered into her hair, shifting his weight until he was laying beside her on the bed rather than on top of her. He ran his fingers through her soft blond hair, down the side of her face. She moved closer to him, curling up slightly against his chest. "Whatever you need, I am always here."

"Just lie here with me for now, that's all I need." She replied lazily. She cracked one eye open and giggled, trying to focus her eyes on him. She was no virgin to hallucinogens, but they were strange with mechanical eyes that were determined to examine all the impossible things that were happening. Wherever she focused her attention the world was perfectly normal. In her peripheral vision everything wavered and moved, bleeding into everything else. "Wow. Whatever it is that you're carrying around in your mouth, it packs quite a punch."

"Are you unwell?" He asked, his voice instantly concerned. There was always a chance that something could go horribly wrong when species co-mingled at this level. She waved a reassuring hand at him and laughed as it left long, ghostly traces of itself in the air. She waved it back and forth, watching them for a second before she remembered what she was doing and looked back at him.

"I'm fine. Just tripping out a little bit." She let her hand fell back and closed her eyes again. "Just hold me for a while, it'll go away."

As he had promised, he gave her what she needed, his warm arms around her, fingers still casually exploring the soft, sloping lines of her body. As the world turned and swam around her she did not sleep, but she managed to grab a few moments of peace in the face of all that was surely coming for her.


	11. 11

Their descent had been silent and tense, which was not normal for them, at least not lately. In the past weeks they had talked and joked, the laughable incompetence of their opposition eliminating the usual tension of flying into combat. Now Shepard sat with her fingers interlaced and elbows braced against her knees and stared unflinchingly at the floor between her booted feet, her slumped shoulders and expressionless face made her posture appear almost relaxed at first but both people in the shuttle knew her too well to be fooled by it. She was too still, her jaw locked and shoulders hunched slightly forward as she applied her unwavering personal control over the many conflicted feelings raging through her. Out of respect for her meditations, they did not disturb the silence of the small vessel and stared out of the windows with feigned interest the entire way down to the spreading carpet of Mindoir`s arboreal forests.

"Scans indicate that little has changed about Mindoir since the last time you were here Shepard. However, I am having difficulty detecting the exact location of the stronghold here."

"The mountains do that. They're magnetically unique." Shepard ran her hand over her face and examined the garbled scans that EDI was sending her. Life signs everywhere, flicking in and out of existence, but localized into a four square mile area located just north of the border of the forest. She instructed the shuttle to set them down in one of the barren, rocky outcroppings among the trees and returned to her silence until the thud of metal on soil alerted her to the end of this long pilgrimage. As she stepped out of the small space and inhaled, her lungs suddenly full of the sweet aroma of fresh, wet earth she felt as though she had been on her way here a long time. Rolling her shoulders under the thick armour plates of her gauntlets she hopped down, her boots striking earth and grass with a soft thud. She moved forward, using the barrel of her shotgun to swipe away the curtains of shoulder-height grass that had taken over where the soil was too thin for trees. Small, sky-blue flowers crunched under foot as she surveyed the motionless woods all around them.

"Wow." Garrus commented, as the shuttle pulled up behind them, cradling his assault rifle in his hands, but not pointing it at anything in particular. He watched the shuttle as it pulled up over the distant tree tops, his mandibles twitching inquisitively. "How tall are these trees? "

"Two hundred feet on average." Shepard replied automatically. "It's not unusual for them to be taller though. Three hundred feet, four in the old growth parts of the forest, but those are in the low lands. They never stop growing, and they live to be thousands of years old." She felt like a travel brochure and shut her mouth, tapping at her navigational display. They were using the Normandy as a satellite to overcome the havoc Mindoir's strange magnetism was having on their sensors, EDI handling the immensely complex task with all the cool, easy efficiency of a master AI. At least it told her which way was north.

Garrus looked impressed, turning in a slow circle as he studied the rolling eternity of ancient behemoths around them. Thane was silent, as he often was, but his face communicated a similar sense of wonder at the sight before him. Nestled at the foot of the forest it was easy to imagine that it went on forever in all directions, the world cast eternally in twilight by the enormous canopy overhead. The departure of the shuttle had heralded the rise of the forests voice as well, a thousand strange creatures they could not see raising their voices among the distant branches.

"Word to the wise, the bugs run big here." Shepard`s voice was steely as she readied her M-6 with armour piercing ammo. The other two snapped out of their appreciation and became suddenly businesslike, bracing their rifles against their shoulders and taking their positions at her left and right. "And they bite hard enough to make it through Kevlar, and most of them have a wicked hive mentality that will bring a thousand of them crawling out of the ground the minute you crush one. I recommend leaving them alone and hoping they're in a similarly charitable mood."

"How big are we talking?" Garrus asked, his small blue eyes considerably less admiring as he squinted at the advancing tree line.

"There's one about the length of your arm." She glanced over her shoulder at him. "With pincers and a barbed spear they shoot at you from their mouths. Most of the others are smaller. Most." She turned back to the woods and heard him make a nervous sound in his chest. She would not have expected a turian to have a thing about bugs. They had always reminded her of some sort of warm-blooded mantis with their mandibles and hard scales and everything. She thought it wise not to mention her musings to Garrus, it seemed like the kind of thing that would be insensitive to say a loud.

"Charming place for a colony." He mused. "Not just the Terminus fringe, but the planet infested with living nightmares. Why don't we ever go anywhere nice?" He was trying to lighten the mood, she realized and gave him a strained smile in place of a thanks.

"They stay in the forest mostly, they have a dependency on a nutritional compound in the wood. The only time we ever encountered them was on the way to temple, and that was part of the whole thing. Peril in pursuit of faith and overcoming it with patience and virtue rather than with violence." Shepard replied, the words gushing out with barely a flicker of conscious decision on her part. She did not have to turn around to sense their blank stares and realized that had probably been the largest and most complex detail of her former life that she had ever revealed to anyone.

"Did you live around here?" Thane asked. His voice was quiet, breathy, and despite all that she was engrossed in at the moment she could not help but feel a tingle in the skin along her neck where she had felt that voice whispering in a similar fashion just hours before. She did not let it distract her.

"No, probably not. Mindoir is a big planet, and a pretty major part of it is covered in these forested mountain areas. We colonized them because their signal-disrupting magnetism was supposed to keep us safe from pirates and slavers. Or, safer at least." The irony of her own words tasted sour in her mouth and she made a face. "There's hundreds of miles of forest on this planet, we're probably nowhere near where I grew up. It all feels familiar though."

Again, the feeling of their eyes on her. She decided it would be best to keep her mouth shut for a while and directed them forward, into the gloom of the underbrush with a few terse flicks of her hand instead. They obeyed without question, as they always did, and they all moved forward, ducking under the cerated fronds of a venomous fern and around a hive of fist-sized, twelve legged insectoid creatures in the process. By the time the trees began to thin and the meadows became visible, slopping up to the colder, rockier areas where the great forest stopped, her companions were significantly less impressed with the wonder of Mindoir`s forests.

"So there aren't any monstrous freak creatures up there?" Garrus asked. He had not spoken since she had pointed out the hive to him and his voice was still slightly hoarse. She could not help but grin at him as she nodded reassuringly. He glared at her. "Don't give me that look Shepard."

"I've just never seen this side of you before. All scared and vulnerable." She teased. She was relaxing slightly, the lines in her shoulders easing as she became accustomed to the familiarity of the planet. The clean air, the constant sounds of thousands of creatures feeding, fighting and breeding and the slightest hitch in the gravity that she could feel as nothing more than a lightness in her step as the burden of her heavy armour and weapons was lifted were all things she had forgotten she enjoyed. She had loved this place, she remembered now after so many years. As a child she had thought there could be nowhere in the universe more beautiful than Mindoir and its symphony of gargantuan life cycles.

He clicked his mandibles in her direction, a turian variation of 'fuck you' as she understood it, and she just grinned harder as they cleared the tree-line and she squinted up, over the stony meadows. The mountains were as strange as the rest of the planet, symmetrical ridges of stone swirling across their faces. Nothing moved, but slowly a frown creased the centre of Shepard's forehead and she turned to Thane.

"I need to use your scope." He handed her his rifle without question, glancing across the motionless grass for some sign of what was concerning her. Nothing made itself apparent, and as she lifted his rifle to her shoulder to peer at the distant pattern on the mountains it became obvious that something was wrong. Her face was an almost sickly yellow when she lowered the gun again and handed it back to him.

"Those aren't natural formations." She said, squaring her shoulders and taking a visibly steadying breath. "Those are farming terraces, man made for growing grain. Those specific terraces, are the ones that overlooked our colony, which must be just beyond that rise." She pointed east with her pistol, her voice sounding hollow and strangely flat as though she were straining to speak.

"Oh." It was the only response anyone could muster for a moment and then Shepard shrugged, as though the weight of her armour were suddenly too much for her to handle and motioned them forward again. They hesitated for a moment, and then moved to their proper positions at her side. As they made their way along the rocky ground, damp lichen and moss treacherously slippery under foot, Thane pulled close to her.

"Are you alright?" He asked quietly, his eyes flicking to her only once as he scanned the lifeless horizon.

"Yes." She replied. Nothing resembling emotion was working within her at the moment. It was likely that the pirates they were hunting had decided to reinforce the infrastructure of the abandoned colony to save time and resources rather than build their own base in the surrounding hills. It was most logical for her to go this way, to do a thorough sweep of any of the buildings that might still be standing before moving on. But with every step her body screamed at her to turn back, to get back in the shuttle and just run away. It was a feeling she had never in her life experienced before and it made her angry, spurred her on because of sheer stupid pride. She had never run away from anything in her life, and she was not going to start now when she most needed to be strong. "Stay alert."

He said nothing in response, just nodded and fell back a few steps. She could feel his eyes linger on her, however briefly, and tried to ignore it. She did not need sympathy right now, sympathy would be the thing that tipped her from anger to despair. She needed to be angry at the moment, needed the hard, brutal intensity it gave her. There would be time for softness later.

They paused as the first outlines of old buildings appeared around the bend of the hill. She called halt with a raised fist and dropped to one knee, noting defence turrets and a few lazy looking batarian guards smoking cigarettes as their rifles leaned against the wall beside them. Shepard made a sound of disgust, wondering if she was ever going to meet a pirate that was not an idiot and invited Garrus and Thane to take position with a wave of her arm. Six bullets for six guards. Not one got so much as a finger on their weapon before it was over.

"Good work." Shepard muttered into the radio as they began their advance. The defence turret swivelled around to target them as they entered its sensor radius, but Garrus was already raising his omnitool and an explosion of blue sparks preceded its loud explosion. From further down the narrow street came sounds of shouting. Shepard dashed into cover behind the nearest house, her M-6 drawn up against her chest and peered down the shockingly familiar street. She could almost see her old life interposed upon the present, the shadows of people etched over the decay of nineteen years of neglect. She signalled that there were two more turrets and advised a cautious advance before they surged forward with the quick, single-minded synchrony of true soldiers.

The second turret was down and the third was dying before the first counter wave reached them, a rabble of disorganized amateurs with assault rifles. They stood too close together, but did not seem to be working together in the least bit. A well placed shockwave sent a handful of heavily armoured batarians flying like rag dolls, where sniper shots picked them effortlessly out of the air. In less than a minute eight men were dead and the final turret exploded with enough force to send a piece of itself crashing through an intact glass window. Shepard tapped at her navigator and then remembered that it was not working. She looked up and down the street and then shrugged.

"This way." She ordered. They went.

The next wave had an officer, an older looking batarian missing one of his upper eyes. As he screamed at his men to get into formation Shepard hit him with a blast of warp energy and Thane followed with a single deadly shot to his unhelmeted head. Any semblance of order dissolved as he crumpled to the ground twitching, and the three attackers resumed their effortless slaughter. It was silent, gruesome work, each of them knowing the other so well that verbal orders and confirmations were a waste of time. They killed like one being, moving up through the street toward the heavily reinforced building that had once been town hall.

"Three combat turrets, crammed in behind tank cover." Thane reported as they dove into cover to escape a barrage of bullets. There was a dull whistle and thudding geyser of fire from the corner of the wall they had disappeared behind and he sighed. "Two combat turrets and a rocket turret." He corrected himself.

"There's a back door. Let's check that." Shepard reported, beginning to circle the house. There were no guards outside, the majority of the force having most likely retreated inside relying on their nest of machinery to do their work for them. The two men followed her, around the reeking pile of garbage the pirates had simply piled up a few feet away from their base of operations and heading around the back of the building. A woody vine with large bluish leaves that smelled faintly like dry mould was growing up the side of the building, completely obscuring the windows and, they discovered after a bit of probing and tearing, hiding the back door. Shepard laughed low in her throat. "Every moment that passes I hate pirates a little more."

She broke the door open with one well-placed heave of her shoulder and they emerged into a musty backroom, sparsely furnished and defiantly modest in nature. The dust on the floor was thick and almost untouched, it muffled the sounds of their feet as they made their careful way through the old building. Unlike most places built in the last thousand years or so, the houses on Mindoir were made of stone, and it felt different to walk in them again now that she was so much older. Had the rooms always been this small? The ceilings always so low? They seemed almost claustrophobic to her now.

There was only one squad, a nervous rabble drawn up in front of the main door behind the turrets, so forward focused that they easily eliminated all their rocket troops within ten seconds of engagement. As reinforcements funnelled down the stairs Shepard could not pass up the opportunity to slap out her grenade launcher. As she went down on one knee in the centre of the hall, the unwieldy machine balanced on one shoulder, Thane took point behind her, covering her with rapid bursts from his SMG while Garrus hung further back still, belly to the floor and put his sniper rifle to good use. A single grenade was all it took to disperse the group choking the centre of the stairs, fifteen men vanishing in an explosion of gore and stone chips. Those outside of the blast radius back pedalled furiously, trying to get back to solid footing as rotten mortar crumbled from between the cut stone stairs and they began to slip away underfoot. As they slipped and fell she unloaded another grenade among them, cries of agony erupting and then dying as Garrus snuffed them out one by one.

It was silent in the small hallway as Shepard stood up, slinging the launcher back in place and cracking her neck.

"Amateurs." Garrus grumbled.

"I know." Shepard agreed. She took another deep breath and put her hands on her hips and surveyed the blood-spattered carnage of the main hall. "This is the biggest group we've taken out yet. Hopefully this will piss someone important off."

Garrus stared at her for a moment and then sighed, rolling his shoulders. "Whatever you say, Shepard."

As they headed out, picking their way through the bodies and parts of bodies littering the floors and headed toward the main room where voting and town council meetings had been held when she was a child Shepard could hear the rumble of panicked batarian voices. She activated her barrier and broke into a run, tucking her shoulder down and smashed the wooden door off its hinges. As she turned to the first of the remaining batarians there was a pulse of dazzling white and then the smell of ozone. She swore, shielding her eyes and throwing a ball of furious biotic energy at the nearest silhouette. It sent the batarian engineer that had been crouched over a computer console smashing into the wall behind him, the back of his head making an unpleasant crunching sound as it met stone. Thane killed the other occupant with a blast of warp energy complimented nicely with bullets. They were suddenly alone.

"FUCK." Shepard swore, tearing off her helmet and staring at ominously dark, unresponsive circuits. She tried to access her omnitool, only to find she could not even pull the damn thing up. "FUCK!"

"Indeed." Thane replied placidly, tapping at his own similarly dysfunctional radio. She glared at him and glanced to her other companion, hoping against hope for a miracle, only to have Garrus shrug helplessly and swore again, vicious and filthy.

"Fuck." She spat, resisting the urge to throw the stupid helmet against the nearest hard surface, which happened to be the corpse of the batarian she had just killed. "Shit. Fuck."

"Indeed."

Shepard rubbed the back of her neck with one hand and placed the other one on her hip, still hooked around the chin guard of her helmet as she took a few deep breaths. This was not a problem. Radio transmission was down, but Garrus was pretty good with tech. He might be able to salvage something. If all else failed, after four hours with no communication update Miranda would lead a team to investigate their disappearance anyway. There was really nothing to worry about. Except that of all the fucking planets it could have happened on, it had to be MINDOIR that they were stuck on.

"Okay. Let's search this place. Hopefully we didn't give them a chance to fuck us by frying all their systems when they started losing." She was standing straight and purposefully again but did not sound hopeful. Batarian battle custom was to do just that.

A scan of the facility revealed an amazing amount of red sand, Shepard's mood brightening considerably at that, and she remarked that one of the larger gangs had probably been using this organization to smuggle them across the fringe systems into Citadel space. It did not reveal a single piece of working electronic equipment, however, and that killed any excitement the prospect of pissing off major criminal organizations may have had sparked in her. She sighed, abandoning the last cold and dysfunctional circuit board and stood, putting her hands on her hips.

"Well, I guess we've got some time to kill." She remarked with a helpless shrug of her shoulders. "We might as well burn these drugs while we wait for a pick up."

They found a barren patch of rocky soil a few hundred yards from the house of slaughter and spent the next hour moving over sixty kilograms of red sand out of its various semi-intelligent hiding places throughout the building. Shepard found dry paper and some wood and started a little fire in the centre of the bundles, and before long tongues of red fire were shooting along the cloth wrappings, consuming the foul stuff and throwing up clouds of acrid black smoke. Shepard retreated to the edge of the meadow and stared down, over the rows of ramshackle buildings that had once been her home. After a moment she felt a presence at her side and turned to see Garrus standing beside her, looking at the same things and seeing... she wondered what. For her everything here seemed so important, so grand and full of meaning. To him it must seem like every other shitty little colony they had run into out here.

"Are you going to be okay?" He asked finally, turning away from the view of dirty, overgrown streets and looking at her instead.

"I'm fine Garrus. Really." She replied. It was not all a lie. She honestly was not feeling much of anything right now, other than a seething confusion and frustration. What joke of the universe was it that pirates should wind up here out of all planets in the Terminus Systems and in her old settlement of all the places on Mindoir? Had her father been here, he would have called it karma. She recoiled at that thought, it was riddled with too many emotions that were already much to near to breaking her stoicism. Now was not the time for the kinds of thoughts they would bring. "You don't have to worry about me."

"Maybe not, but I do anyway." He replied, turning to face her head on. His small blue eyes were bright, active with emotion that quivered through his mandibles. Had she been better with turian facial expression she might have been able to tell what it was for certain. At the moment though, it seemed like a very genuine concern. "You always say that you're 'fine' when anyone asks you how you feel, always, no matter what the situation and to be honest Shepard it's not a very good lie. You said you thought of me like family, and well... it's the same for me. So I worry. If I don't who will?"

"I don't need anyone to worry about me." She insisted, as he crossed his arms and stubbornly remained concerned. "Really. I'm not... I'm not fine with what's going on right now. But I'm dealing with it, the same way I've always dealt with it. I've been an orphan the entire time you've known me, Garrus. These feelings are nothing new."

"Shepard." Thane's voice, hoarse with sudden emotion, interrupted them and they both looked up. Up until that moment he had been staring out across the northern meadows with studious concentration, giving them their privacy and perhaps meditating as he often did in the small lulls in combat they were provided. "There's... something here you should see."

His voice filled her with subconscious dread as she skirted the mounting fire, leaning away from the clouds of odorous smoke wafting off and stared down the slope of the hill, into the small gulch that preceded the beginning of the mountains steep rise. For a moment she saw nothing but tangled vegetation, but her mechanical eyes adjusted themselves, her corneas rotating and she saw with sudden clarity the ridges of skeletons clustered there. Human skeletons.

"Oh." She said softly. Something cold was slithering down her spine, making goose bumps rise across her back. As she continued to stare she realized that the entire swath of thick vines and roots growing down there were poking through a massive pile of human bones. Five hundred and twenty six people had lived in their little settlement, and though she knew that many of them had been taken by the slavers rather than killed outright it seemed to her that there were a lot of bodies rotting down there. "Oh... that's... oh..."

She turned and walked away, not looking at either of them, and headed past the town hall they had made into a slaughterhouse. She was not entirely sure where she was going, as she disappeared over the knoll and headed down into the familiar streets. She just knew that she was going away from THAT.

Garrus and Thane stared at each other for a long moment, each of them twitching with their need to go after her. The fire continued to rage, too large to be left unattended and they both knew it. After a moment Garrus nodded in her direction and sighed.

"Go on then. I guess I'm glad she has someone else that cares." He said finally. Thane nodded his thanks and left, jogging over the stony earth as Garrus sat down and pulled his rifle into his lap, beginning to clean it more out of habit then necessity. The thick smoke rising from the towering inferno coloured the sky with smears of rotten black and grey.

"Siha!" Thane called after her, as she continued to make her way through the overgrown streets. None but the most hard-packed of the dirt roads had remained, the rest of the once immaculate streets had become crowded with weeds and grass long ago. She paused in front of her grandparents house for a moment, which gave Thane the time he needed to catch up with her. "Siha, I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault. I would have seen them eventually." She replied, staring at the line of Hindu blessings carved above the doorway. She had not read Sanskrit in almost twenty years, and she fumbled over a few of the words as she tried to remember what exactly they said, but in the end nothing could wash the memory of their meaning from her mind. He came up beside her, staring up at the inscription and then back to her.

"What does it say?" He asked quietly. The usual 'are you okay' seemed a tad overdone at this point. She very obviously was not.

"You have only the power to act, you do not have the power to influence the result, therefore you must act without the anticipation of result without succumbing to inaction." She recited, smiling to herself. "My grandfather carved it there the day the house was finished. He meditated on it all day, every day. It was very… inactive of him." Her laugh was humourless and brief.

"Meditated?" Thane looked baffled by the idea of humans doing anything so calm and sedate and it earned him another one of those cold, humourless laughs. It made him flinch, slightly and she shook her head as she turned away from the familiar doorway. She knew what she would find inside, nothing of any value beyond self-inflicted emotional torture.

"Yes, yes, even humans can sit still and be quiet occasionally. We meditated a lot here, and prayed and did yoga which is pretty much just a combination of those two you do while bending your legs into a pretzel and breathing deeply." The bitterness of her words left a foul tang on her tongue and she grimaced faintly. "That was all we did here, meditated, prayed and farmed. Sometimes in the winter we would go to school, which was a room in the town house where an old woman read to us from the Vedas and taught us the mathematics we needed for building drainage ditches and barns. Prayer five hours a day, four of meditation and yoga, six in the fields and the rest of the waking hours spent cooking and cleaning and mending. That was my entire life here."

The hollowness had returned to her voice as she made her way down the street, staring at everything and not really seeing it. She was looking back in her mind, back to a time when everything had been so different, so full of life and colour that it was hard to imagine had been real. In its decomposing state everything seemed so leeched, devoid of the vibrancy she remembered. She wondered if her memories of the blissful tranquility she had felt here were even real, if they were some fantasy her mind had cooked up after years on the streets, after Torfan and after death. Everyone always talked about the good old days, after all, while no one ever seemed happy in the present. Her memories of Mindoir could be just a continuation of that pattern.

"This was a cult?" Thane asked, sounding shocked. He looked around the small, silent buildings as though seeing them for the first time. Dusk was gathering on the horizon, and the fading light made the shadows darken like bruises, everything coloured sinister shades of grey and blue. She laughed and shook her head, either in answer or to alleviate the tension gathering in her muscles it was hard to say.

"People called it that. We called it a religious commune. Maybe they mean the same thing." She stopped again, staring up at a house that looked quite similar to all the others. A smashed window, a broken door sagging off its hinges onto the collapsing porch. It looked treacherous, unsafe, but she pressed on, climbing the steps and picking her way carefully through the patches of rot and powdered wood until she passed inside. Thane followed her, not sure if that was what she wanted but not knowing what else to do. "But our cult was nine thousand years old, and had no fat old man controlling us with drugs or charisma. We were in this life for a higher purpose, and the way we lived was just a reflection of that."

"What higher purpose?" Thane asked as she looked around the fanatically humble room, furnished with nothing but a low table and set of washing basins against one wall. To the side, three low doorways led into the bedrooms. It all seemed very rustic and agrarian. All but the skeleton sprawled across the floor. He took a slight step back as he saw it, but Shepard just walked closer, pushing open the broken door and stopping in the centre of the tiny bedroom.

She shrugged. "I don't know. Enlightenment, I suppose. Nirvana. The concept doesn't translate well from deed to words, but in the end I guess we were just looking for meaning. Why are we alive? Why is anything alive? What is our purpose? We thought God had the answers." She picked something up off the floor and Thane moved closer, realizing it was the pieces of some crude clay structure that had been smashed beyond recognition. There was also another skeleton in here, and a collection of mouldy, broken wood against one wall.

"It was all so clear…" She whispered, more to herself than to him. "If you followed the laws, the divine laws, it was supposed to be clear." Her hands began to tremble and the pieces of clay dropped, falling between her boots and crumbling all the more, nothing but dust now, dust among dust.

"What was supposed to be clear?" He asked, drawing closer to her. She looked up at him, her eyes glowing brilliant orange in the dim light.

"Everything. You do no harm to the world, because violence only begets more violence. You do no harm and no harm will find you. That was the way it worked." Her voice sounded coarse, slightly angry as the looked over at the skeleton sprawled against the wall. The stone floor underneath him was stained black with old blood, and Thane could see from the shape of the head that it was a batarian. After so long it was hard to say exactly how he had died, but the shattered pelvis probably had not helped anything.

"And then I killed these men, in this room where I had worked so hard to be good and pure and everything became suddenly murky. That one would have raped me. They both would have killed me. Even the Bhagavad says that you can kill in self-defence and suffer no negative karma. But when I killed them, everything changed." She shook her head, slapping dust off the palms of her gloves and sighed. "I thought coming back here would make things clearer, at least. I don't know why I thought that, but I did."

"And how do you feel?" Thane asked quietly, putting his hand on her shoulder to try and comfort her, try to do anything that would make something about this easier for her. Under her blond hair her face was pale and drawn, her lips drawn tight into a grimace of constant pain. She shook her head and he placed his other hand on her shoulder, forcing her to face him. "What do you need?"

"I need to be alone." She said, finally, looking up at him for a moment before she turned away, looking down at the featureless block of grey stone that had been laid against the far wall. He said nothing for a long moment, just stared at her with eyes she could always feel, even when she could not see them.

"As you wish." He said, after a long moment. And, as ever, Shepard was alone.


	12. 12

She did not know what she had expected to find here, among the dust and old bones of her childhood bedroom. Everything was positioned exactly how she remembered it, completely untouched by anything but the natural ravages of time for almost two decades. The smashed bed, the closet door slightly ajar with the her ineffective hiding place thrown wide open all looked almost exactly as they had the day Anderson had carried her from this room, save for the liberal addition of mould and filth. She squinted at the floor and nudged the dust piles with her toe, exposing the glitter of natural quartz in the stone floors, and the old black stains that marred them. Her own blood, from her first broken nose. How many times had she broken the damn thing now? Six? It was hard to remember.

It was always hard for her to remember things like that, her brain too crowded with her various responsibilities to leave much room for mundane recollection. Battle tactics, ship status, crew status, weapon and armour status, politics, support, and opposition, all stabbing at her constantly, vying for priority in her day to day life. She woke up thinking about shield upgrades and went to sleep thinking about three point assault tactics. Her entire life was work, even when she was sitting at dinner or brushing her teeth or surfing her personal messages wondering what all these people who reached out to her were expecting. Mindoir was unique in that it was one of the only civilian aspects of her life that she remembered with absolutely perfect clarity almost two full decades after she had left it behind.

Or thought she had. She rubbed at the hump of deformed bone in the centre of her nose as she continued to look around the barren, lifeless little room where the little girl she had been was ultimately destroyed. That was the essence of it, the final reality that she had tried and tried and tried to deny. Mindoir had not made her stronger, the trials she had faced here did not harden her soul and spur her forward in pursuit of the justice she had been denied. The simple, sweet, pious girl that she had been simply did not exist anymore and Commander Jane Shepard, the Butcher of Torfan, the Saviour of the Citadel and the hundred other major and minor titles she had borne throughout her life was an artifice she had created to hide it. She had no more faith, no more belief that she even had a soul or that there was such a thing in the galaxy as true justice.

Anger surged through her, irrational hatred for what she had been and what she was now. She had knelt before the altar in blind faith, accepting the cluster-fuck of circular thinking that was karma and dharma, nirvana and Shiva. Now she believed in nothing, wandering through the universe on an insane quest that had been given to her because she was the only one with a hope in hell of succeeding. To what purpose? For what cause? What was the point of all this doubt and pain?

Why was she even alive?

A wordless scream of frustration ripped from her lips and she turned, furiously kicking at the pile of rotted wood that had once been her bed. It exploded under her wrath, a cloud of powdery splinters flying up around her and she ripped off her helmet, throwing it across the room where it slammed into the stone and went bouncing away, through the door and into the silent main room of the house. Her breath hissed out through clenched teeth as she glared around the cramped space, looking for something that could take the brunt of her boiling rage. A sliver of white caught her eye, on the floor of the closet, mostly hidden by the open trapdoor. She stalked over to it, kicking the door closed with one boot and only stopped when she realized what it was.

The Bhagavad Gita. Nibbled by pests at the edges, yellowed by long years in the open air, the paper so dry that when she picked it up she was afraid it might crumble entirely into dust. She unrolled it carefully, her mechanical eyes able to pick out the shape of the words even in the heavy darkness that was descending as the last rays of sunlight faded beyond the broken window. The words of Sanjaya and Dhritarashtra were things she simply could not forget, no matter how many times she tried. As she read them, stumbling over a few words and gaining confidence as her ability to read the twisted characters came pouring back she felt the anger leak out of her slightly, becoming less poignant, less intense. The great epic of prince Arjuna had endured in human thought for almost ten thousand years, if the Vedic scholars were to be believed.

"My limbs grow weak; my mouth is dry, my body shakes, and my hair is standing on end. My skin burns, and the bow of Gandiva has slipped from my hand. I am unable to stand; my mind seems to be whirling." Was that not familiar? How many times had she stood, shoulders square and jaw locked as she attempted to appear strong for everyone standing around her, while such terrified doubt boiled within her? How many times had she pulled her gun and felt its weight in her hand like an accusation? Many, many times. She knew how Arjuna, the great prince of the epic, would ask his many questions about killing and death to the Lord Krishna, knew what the gods answers would be, knew exactly how the long battle on the fields of Kurukshetra would unfold even as she continued to unroll the paper and read. Slowly, Shepard sank to her knees on the cold stone floor, among the dust and ghosts of her past. She remembered everything about this story, but the words poured into her as she knelt in the centre of the floor like she had a thousand times before. That was where the extraction team found her, hours later, when they made their way into the house.

"Shepard?" Tali's voice was faint, a mechanized purr from behind her opaque mask. Her commander, her captain, looked up from her place on the floor and furled the paper she had been reading again, being careful not to tear the delicate material, and tied it with the faded blue ribbon. There was a silent tension in the air, not helped by the presence of the skeletons or the expressionless stone of her features. She stood, carefully, pitching slightly as she realized that her knees had locked from hours of bearing her full weight against the unyielding stone floor. Tali had picked up her helmet in the other room and held it out to her. "I told Miranda and Jacob that they should wait outside."

"Thank you." She took the useless piece of equipment and secured it back on her head, the visor softening the intensity of her large, haunted eyes and the tightness of her features. A deep breath squared her shoulders, strengthened her core and gave her focus. It was time to get off this planet, something that she desperately wanted. Or thought she did at least, like everything else the thought of leaving now was coloured with all sorts of strange and conflicted feelings that she did not entirely understand. "Thane and Garrus?"

"Putting out the last of the fire. That was a lot of red sand, someone is going to be very unhappy with us." Tali commented as Shepard finally turned to face her, her expression unreadable. The quarian had become used to reading human faces and it was a shock to see the stony lack of emotion on her face when she knew that Shepard must be reeling inside. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No, I don't." Shepard replied, sounding tired. "Not yet."

The young woman nodded, rubbing her hands together in the way she did when she was nervous. She had never been Shepard's shoulder to cry on, she was not sure that anyone really was, and had always been content to have the occasional girl talk or poker night rather than the in-depth emotional conversations that seemed to characterize deep friendship among her people. But when she had been vulnerable, with the trial and her fathers horrific crimes and her struggle to accept Legion as a member of their crew Shepard had been there, to support her, to offer advice that had been simple, direct and made things a little bit easier, a little bit better. She was comfortable, stable, a person that could be relied upon for everything. And now she was suffering, so obviously suffering, and Tali had no idea what to do or say.

"If you need anything..." She finally managed to say, the sentence trailing off as she realized how trite it must sound, how everyone made that offer when they simply had nothing else to give. She did not have the answers Shepard was looking for, the closure she needed or the redemption she craved. The commander just shook her head and put a hand on her shoulder, pulling her lightly toward the door. They did not speak, even as Jacob and Miranda fell in step with them and they headed up toward the remains of the fire to collect the two remaining squad members. The silence was heavy and turgid, and Shepard could feel her skin crawl under their scrutiny, longing for the solitude of her quarters on the Normandy or even of the room she had just left behind again.

A similar silence greeted them at the edges of the smoky black stain that had once been a fortune of illicit narcotics. Shepard nodded her approval at it, satisfied that this trip had at least ensured the destruction of that evil stockpile, and the six of them headed for the shuttle. The fire had provided an easy target for the search party, and they were piled in and headed back to their ship in under ten minutes, a small blessing in the face of everything that had happened. Shepard stared at the floor, much as she had on the way down here, the Bhagavad cradled gently in her hands. Mercifully, her squad remained silent and she did not have to fence off the many tender inquiries about her mental status. Those were what would really make her crazy.

The forty minutes it took for their shuttle to make it through the atmosphere to be scooped up by the Normandy was flat, featureless and seemed to her like single moment. She could not remember any time passing at all before her boots struck steel and she was out, headed for the elevator without a backward glance. Her squad watched her, she could feel them watching her, but they said nothing and did not follow her. She needed her space, needed to think with the supreme clarity that only solitude could provide and they understood that. Or maybe they just did not want to be around her, did not have anything to say and knew any attempt to help would be met with awkward silences and blank stares. Either way, she was thankful for their discretion when her legs gave out in the elevator and she sank to a sitting position, head bowed, shoulders shaking. It would not have been appropriate to have her crew see her like this.

The tears came next, in heavy, wracking waves that made her shake and tremble as she dragged herself out of the elevator, barely able to stand under the crushing weight of so much sudden pressure. She tore at the nodes that held plates of heavy metal clamped in place and they released with a sigh, letting a rush of cool air in against her skin. She began peeling layers off with feverish intensity, her gauntlets and chest plate gone by the time the door whooshed open to allow her passage into her private rooms. She merely kicked her discarded armour through the door as she reached her quarters, tugging at the zipper that fastened her armour padding in place and sliding it off her arms. The warm sweat on her skin gelled, making her feel instantly clammy in the mild cold of her quarters. She continued to shed her armour, desperate to get it off, to escape this terrible sensation of being crushed and smothered.

By the time she was naked, standing in the centre of her quarters and still holding the Bhagavad in one hand, her tears streaming freely down her face now that there was no one to watch her cry she realized that she had no idea what she should be doing. Her empty fish tanks bathed her skin in pale blue light as she looked down at the scroll in her hand, tugging the ribbon free and unfurling the epic poem to its full length. She laid it out on the floor, staring down at it, at the answers it claimed to provide. She had hated this thing and the circular logic it represented for years, hated the idea that you could preach pacifism and war with the same breath, hated that it supported the mindless sheep-like belief in a god that had nothing to offer the living for their lifetime of service but the promise of a better kind of death. But she had nothing else to do, so once more she knelt before it and read, until her eyes grew bleary and ached with tiredness. Until the only thing she could do was pop her sleeping pills and collapse on top of her blankets to embrace her usual dark oblivion.

It was hours later, twelve and a half to be exact, when EDI`s soft mechanical voice broke the silence of her quarters and stirred her from her escapism. She looked up, squinting into the shadows of her ceiling as she always did and wiped the grainy remnants of sleep from her eyes.

"People are asking to see you, Commander." The AI informed her mildly. "You have been uncommunicative for almost fourteen hours."

"I can read a clock." Shepard snapped, and even though it was not EDI's fault she did not apologize. She did not want to be disturbed, not by anyone, and certainly not by her own ship. She was mired in a place where all communication would achieve would be anger and stress for everyone involved, a place where she was so close to the edge of reason and rationality that she was not sure she could stop herself from attacking the first person who came up here cooing and begging her pardon and treating her like she was going to fall apart. The gentleness of pity disgusted her, it always had. "Who wants to see me?"

"Miranda would like to know what your orders are regarding the Normandy's next move." EDI supplied helpfully. She spoke in the same manner she always had and Shepard rolled onto her back, relaxing slightly and pressing the back of her hand over her forehead.

"Tell Joker to put her in stationary orbit behind the moon and engage stealth systems. We'll wait for their ship to show up and mount an assault with the intension of capturing it. The usual." She instructed. This was easy, clear even in the maelstrom of violent emotion that was raging through her. Battle came to her with a natural ease that nothing else in the galaxy did, it defined her and made her who she was. She could handle battle plans and tactics. "Tell Miranda to spend the wait supervising discretionary maintenance."

"Understood. Jacob would also like to know if you would still like him to remove the N7 embossing from your armour."

"Yes." Shepard growled. For someone who had left the Alliance by choice long before she had been forced out Jacob seemed hesitant about the idea of scraping away her badge of combative honour. Maybe he thought it meant more than it did, but the fact was that having an N7 emblazoned on her chest made it difficult to convince people out here that she was not simply a dog on a military leash. She needed it gone for practical, pragmatic reasons and the way she felt about it fell behind those. As always.

"I shall inform him." EDI was the best kind of secretary, omnipresent, to the point and without any of the crooning and sensitive shoulder squeezes she always got from Chambers. "And finally, Thane would like to know how you are feeling and if there is anything he can do."

"Tell him to stay where he is." She replied, rolling back onto her stomach and pressing her face into a pillow. She could not face him right now, was not sure that she would ever be able to again. "I don't want to talk to anyone right now."

A moment of silence, which was always strange with EDI who processed thousands of complex thoughts simultaneously every instant and never seemed to take longer than a nanosecond to come up with the perfect response every time. "As you wish." She said finally, and the subsequent silence announced that her attention was elsewhere and Shepard was finally alone again. After almost thirteen hours of sleep that tiny little conversation had exhausted her and she laid in bed, not moving, until the stink of old sweat and her aching bladder forced her to rise and make her way to the sterile military bathroom.

Being clean was something she had once considered to be the highest luxury, but lately she found that the only reason she spent so much time in the shower was because she had nothing else to fill her hours with. She had always thought that her obsession with work, her need to stay focused and on task had been a reflection of her driving personality, but her tragic epiphany on Mindoir had illuminated exactly how untrue that was. Her drive was powered merely by the fact that she had nothing else to consume her, nothing else to do when she was not fighting or directing other people to fight. It was the same with many soldiers, she had come to understand, as concerns like music, vids and relationships became pale and distant between the rigorous of life among the stars and the extreme violence of a life of combat. With her it was simply more intense, as was the case with most things.

She dressed herself in the usual black pants and shirt, garments as featureless as her and made her way back out to her quarters. She stopped, looking around the featureless room with her hands clasped in front of her. The Bhagavad was again the only thing she had to do other than sit in silence and think and she picked it up and carried it to her desk chair as she found her place again. She was almost finished it now, the familiar words refreshed by her twenty years of neglect and her revelation of insignificance. She could see something in it that was unlike the reverence of her child self or the bitter cynicism of her nihilistic young adulthood. There was a simplicity to the concepts of this text underneath the wordy poetry that typified Hindu scripture. It was scripture, but it was also a guide to simple goodness. She could see that now. She did not believe in it, in the idea that virtue could be a shield and that all life was precious but she could see something good in it again.

There were many good things about Mindoir, she thought, leaning back as her attention wandered from the script before her. The majestic, rolling mountains, the slanting cathedral twilight of the forests, even the insects that Garrus loathed so much had their own sort of striking alien beauty. Life had been hard, both at a spiritual and physical level, but her parents had always been happy. Her brothers and her had always been happy, well fed and active. She had been at peace, loved by her family and loving them in return with a ferocity that she had not felt again until she laid in Kaidan`s arms hurtling toward an almost certain death. Even now that grade of emotion seemed difficult to fathom, let alone muster in herself. She could not care that much about anything, not even the fate of the entire galaxy, not even herself.

The Bhagavad had defined a great deal of what she remembered Mindoir to be like, she realized, looking down at the script in her hands. She had not been the only one who knew each word by heart, who had grown up looking at it as the essential manual for achieving the ultimate nirvana. Their entire commune lived by its words, by the wisdom of Krishna even as they all worshipped different forms of their gods. Shiva had been the object of her families worship, but all the faces of god were acknowledged and celebrated in their household and in the village. The love that community had contained and felt for one another had come from their belief in the teachings of the Bhagavad, from the clarity of their meditations and the fervour of their faith. It had made them into something Shepard had never ever seen again, a place where everyone believed in the essential goodness of the galaxy and acted with that belief in mind. Honesty, generosity, charity, these were words that had not been unique or special on Mindoir. She had seen them every day, barely believed that there was another way to live.

Of course, this thinking was what had eventually killed them. Thinking of that made her angry again, and she set the fragile scroll down on her desk. If all things in the universe are a part of god, then all things in the universe are a part of each other and to do violence upon one is an abhorrent act that does violence on all. So they had stored no guns, erected no turrets, established no garrison and moved beyond the places where the Alliance would do that for them without asking. All in pursuit of this divine goodness and the sweet nirvana that would surely be their reward. Had her parents reached enlightenment when they were gunned down by batarians? Had a white light erupted, engulfing and absorbing them into the great oneness that connected the universe together? Were their bones tangled somewhere in that ditch, full of weeds and vines while their souls moved inside her, part of the great wheel no longer?

No. If she believed that, then she would have to believe in everything it entailed. She would have to open the book on god again, a book she had closed tight when she was thirteen years old. There was no god. There was nothing out there guiding her and making her strong. Her parents bones, mouldering in that ditch, were all that remained of them in the universe.

That thought was not helping. Nor was that fleeting memory of the awareness that filled the void between dying and waking on the Lazarus bed. Were her parents there now? Had she touched their consciousnesses there, before the trauma of living again purged the memories from her mind? There were so many questions she could not answer, so many doubts she could not shed. She began to feel again as though she were being crushed, her breath hitching in her chest as she struggled to take long, even breaths. She was losing it, losing all her precious, precarious control and screamed inwardly at herself even as the pressure mounted, making her bow her head and bury it in her hands. This was the end. She did not think she could take it any longer, the stress, the expectations, the juxtaposition of everyone's unflinching certainty and her unwavering doubt. Jane Shepard was finished.

"Siha." She looked up, having not even heard the door open and not remembering that she had told EDI not to allow entrance to anyone. His figure swam before her eyes, she was crying again and had not even realized it. She had told him to stay away, as good as ordered it, and she had meant it at the time. He was aware of this, she could see the uncertainty reflected in his wide dark eyes and the way he hesitated between her seat and the door. She wiped at her eyes and opened her mouth to speak, her voice cracking with the intensity of all she was feeling.

"I'm so glad you're here." She sobbed, actually sobbed, for the first time in her life and a moment later he was kneeling in front of her, his arms suddenly around her as she buried her face in his neck. He did not speak, as his hand settled on her hair and his strong, warm chest pressed against her and she did not try to talk or even try to think either. She just needed something to lean on as she cried, anything to give her an anchor in this tsunami of newly awakened emotion. She just needed him there, and that was all. She could not remember ever having cried in front of someone before, but she felt no shame as she soaked the shoulder of his jacket with her grief. By the time she pulled back, wiping at her red eyes and runny nose she felt empty, hollow in the aftermath of that release. He stood, and so did she, going to the bathroom to blow her nose and wash the rawness of tears from her face. When she reappeared at the door of the washroom she saw that he had removed his jacket and was staring at her empty fish tanks, his eyes far away.

"I did not know if you would want to see me." He confessed, quietly. "Every time I have tried to be closer to you I have found myself pushed away."

She nodded, still silent, and leaned against the doorway to her bathroom as she rubbed the back of her neck. She had never known how it was that people shared grief or struggles with each other, it had always been her choice to bear hers alone. She had thought that would make things easier, put less pressure on those around her and, in the selfish end, make it less painful to lose them. He turned to look at her as she remained silent.

"I have no idea what I am to you." He said finally, as he began moving closer. His gaze was intense, full of confusion and a wide-eyed hurt that she hated to see, especially knowing it was her fault.

"You're closer to me than anyone else in the universe, Rama." She said, closing the distance between them and reaching out to take his hand. He seemed to hesitate on the edge of pulling away and then let her have it, lacing his fingers with hers. She put her other hand on his chest, over his heart, and felt the strong pulse of it under the thin vest he wore. "You're… fuck, you're the only thing in my life that doesn't seem specifically geared toward driving me insane. You're the only one that doesn't expect anything from me and probably the only one that really believes we're going to beat the Reapers and live happily ever after. I pushed you away because I was scared, scared to feel too deeply about something when in the end I think I'm going to die with my pistol in my mouth just so I don't end up as a husk or some updated Collector prototype."

Her voice was trembling as she made her confession, everything spilling out in a rush of complicated thoughts. Her grip on his hand tightened and she pulled herself closer to him, needing to feel his heat, needing to remember that there was something worth being alive for. This, what she felt with him, was the only thing that seemed real anymore and if that was all there was then she was not going to run away from it anymore. She had spent her entire life running without even realizing it, running from what it meant to care about people, to care about the universe in the way she had as a child, running from everything that was difficult about believing in something. She believed in this, in what existed between the two of them, and that would have to be enough for now.

"You know I would never let that happen." He whispered, and his arms were around her now, his eyes burning into hers as he held her close.

"I know. That's why I called you Rama." She replied, running one hand over the back of his head, feeling the ridges along the centre of his skull solid and warm beneath her fingers. "He was a prince and an avatar of Vishnu. A great warrior and by all accounts a wise and patient king that did well by his people. More importantly though, he represents guidance and clarity. And protection." She ran her hand along his cheek and let it fall to his shoulder. "That's what you are to me, Rama. You are what guides me and protects me from myself, from the hopelessness that consumes me when I'm alone. Don't ever doubt how I feel for you, it's the only thing I'm really certain about."

"Siha… I…" He pulled her closer and now she could feel his heart pounding against her chest, the rhythm so strange, almost erratic compared to her own steady pulse. "I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be." She replied, wrapping her arms around his neck. "Just kiss me."

He did, words had taken them as far as they could at this point. Now there was just a deep, physical need to be with him, to feel his presence stabilizing her at least somewhat. Having him here did not erase what was going on, did not make anything better really, but she could feel her heart race and she was at least able to leave it behind her as she pulled him down toward the depressed living quarters and the bed. His lips left hers and she grabbed a handful of his vest, walking backwards down the stairs, never taking her eyes off his.

"I thought you wanted…" He began, his voice coarse in his throat. She had never stopped to think that maybe Thane had as much built up tension as she did, his own warm ache in his stomach that demanded to be satisfied. She glanced down and saw that she had been making a very large oversight indeed and then back up at him to see that he was staring at the bed, whatever thoughts he was having making his eyes darken in a way she had never seen before.

"I know what I want." She replied, grabbing him by the shoulders and giving him a rough shove that sent him tumbling backwards onto the bed. He looked up at her as though he had never seen her before, and he supposed that he never had, not in this particular light. "Don't hesitate on my account. What about you?"

She could feel his eyes rake over her, over the flat and decidedly unflattering clothing she was wearing and that dark look his eyes grew all the deeper, all the more hungry. When he met her eyes again all he could do was nod, and it was all the invitation she needed.

"I was hoping you would say that." She said, pulling her shirt over her head. "EDI, don't interrupt me for anything short of a massive critical systems failure."

"Or a fire?" The AI asked in a tone that was far to cheeky to be a glitch in her vocal array.

"It better be a really big fucking fire." Shepard replied, as she hopped up on the bed, planting her hands on either side of Thane's head as she lowered her head to his.

"Understood, Commander." EDI replied, before signing out and dimming the lights in a way that was perhaps a joke and perhaps just friendly consideration for her commander. Whatever it was, neither of the two people intertwined on the bed paid it any mind.

A\N: Please don't kill me, this is not a black screen, the sexy chapter will most assuredly be coming soon. That is all.


	13. 13

A/N: This chapter is pretty much all about sex and a little bit of fluff. Mostly sex. I feel that Shepard and Thane deserve a little bit of sweaty R&R before the intensity of their personal stories return. If you do not wish to read the smutty, lovey parts you can skip this chapter entirely and the plot will resume in chapter 14, without anything important having been missed. If you do wish to read the smut, please enjoy my first attempt at dirty writing.

At first he seemed to think that he had to be gentle with her, perhaps thinking that the fragile emotional state he had caught her in when he appeared meant that she wanted tender, reassuring cuddling and softness. This was not her style, never had been, and he began to understand that as she tore his vest open, spreading the leather to either side so she could openly ravage his impressive physique with her eyes.

The cables of black that twisted up his arms and across his shoulders and down were amazingly vivid, forking out in jagged stripes across his muscular arms and chest. She ran her hand down one of them, startled by the extreme contrast of their skin, green and gold against each other. His scandalous abdomen was a wall of sculpted muscle, the anatomy of his body familiar enough despite a few striking differences. Most notably, how incredibly smooth he was all over, no nipples or belly button to mark the expanse of light green scales. She looked back up at his face to see that he was studying her with a look that seemed almost nervous. She cocked an eyebrow at him.

"What?" She asked, leaning forward again to nuzzle her face under his jaw and slide her tongue along its sensitive underside. She could feel him tremble underneath her, his hands tracing the length of her powerful legs, up across the naked small of her back making her shiver.

"I wasn`t sure what you would think once I got my clothes off." He confessed, his hands sliding around her waist to her stomach and down the smooth lines of her abdomen. He glanced down as he discovered the small indentation of her belly button and grinned at her as he traced it with one finger.

"Are you kidding? Drell have got to be the prettiest aliens in the galaxy." She paused, thinking about that and shook her head. "Okay, maybe pretty isn't the most encouraging word. But seriously, your skin is goddamn beautiful." She raked her fingers lightly down the long lines of black scales that flanked his abdominal muscles and felt him tense. "And your eyes." She looked up into those amazingly dark, expressive eyes. "And your lips, with that little line." She kissed those lips, running her tongue over them and catching a hint of his sharp citrus taste. "I was more worried about what you would think of me. Drell women are pretty different."

She gave her breasts, still bound in the grey cotton sports bra that was her only lingerie, a meaningful look. One hand rose to the brutal lacerations that ran down the left side of her body, tracing the evil scars with distracted self consciousness. She wondered how it was possible that someone as smooth and perfect as Thane could find something attractive in her body, which looked in many places like it had been simply glued back together after its terrible destruction. She felt his hand suddenly against hers, pressed at the apex of her scar, just under her armpit beside her breast. He sat up under her, looking into her eyes as he drew her close.

"Siha, do you not have any idea how beautiful you are?" He asked quietly, ghosting his lips over her cheeks, over the thin scars that still lingered there, and then over the bump of her often broken nose. She sighed and looped her arms lightly over his shoulders.

"Even human men don't think I'm all that great." She replied wryly. Beautiful was never a word that had been used to describe her, at least not by anyone but the most feverish of her strange little fan base. She was a marine not a model, she could not have cared less if people described her as a walrus as long as they got her combat stats right. Thane pulled back slightly and smiled at her, shaking his head slightly.

"I am not human." He reminded her softly, running his fingers through her hair as he always did. She felt him lift her off the bed, as effortlessly as though she weighed nothing at all, and then she was sinking back against the pillows as he kissed her neck, her shoulders, the first, mostly flat plains of her chest above her bra.

They did not try to speak after that, and Shepard felt herself relax under his ministrations. He shed his vest and ran his hands down her body, tracing the stiff lines of reddish scar tissue that marred her left side as lovingly as she had traced the astounding patterns of his skin. Her fingers slid across the wide, flat scales that covered his head, down his neck, feeling the protective bony ridges of his spine all the way to the small of his powerful back. He felt so different then anything she was used to, hard and unyielding in places, smooth and soft in others. She kissed his shoulder, licked the skin and found no trace of salty human sweat. He tasted exactly like he smelled, clean and fresh with a lingering, tingling hint of spice. She felt his hands slide around her back and run across the smooth cotton of her bra before his head popped up from where he had been gently caressing the back of her ear with his tongue.

"Mordin's diagrams said there would be some sort of hook back there." He said, sounding indignant at the misinformation he had received. She laughed and pulled the garment over her head for him.

"That's for fancy underwear. There's no room for delicate wire hooks in the marine corps." She replied. He did not answer, and she wondered if maybe all his talk about her beauty had been just that, and now that he saw how weird she really was he was having second thoughts. He looked up at her after a moment, catching the doubt flickering through her eyes and shook his head slowly, cupping her breast in one hand and giving it an experimental squeeze. After a moment he laughed out loud and gripped the other, pressing them together.

"Everyone should have these." He said after a moment of her gaping at him dully. His dark eyes sparkled with his mirth when he looked back up at her. "They're so... amusing."

"That's not exactly the reaction I was looking for." She informed him, one eyebrow raised as he continued to explore her alien anatomy. He raised one of his own scaly brows in response to her comment and she gasped, feeling her core suddenly tighten as he rolled her nipple between his thumb and pointer finger gently, teasing it instantly into a hard peak.

"Is that better?" He asked, his voice suddenly dark and sultry. She gasped as he continued to tease her, his other hand similarly attentive on her other breast. That ache, that always present damnably powerful ache was building out of control, making her stomach clench and her thighs tremble as he lowered his head and slid his tongue across the stiff tissue. She moaned, the sound tearing out of her as she arched herself into his touch. It had been so damn long, everything he did was pushing her tantalizingly close to the place where she would lose all control. She moaned again as he drew her into his mouth and nipped, ever so gently, and her hips bucked off the bed involuntarily. He looked up at her, her eyes suddenly hazy with lust over her flushed cheeks and smiled. "I'll take that as a yes."

Growling, she hooked her hand behind his head and drew his face up to hers, her tongue aggressively seeking his. Hallucinogenic saliva be damned, she wanted to fill herself with the sharp, alien flavour of him. He let her, sliding his tongue along across her teeth, touching the dimples of her pallet with tender curiosity. Her arms twined around his neck, her fingers finding those sensitive tracks of skin hidden under the edges of his hard scales and he moaned into her mouth, his hips rocking suddenly forward, until she could feel the hard length of him rubbing up against her. She shuddered and pushed back and they both moaned together as his hands dropped suddenly, desperately, to the waist of her pants and began fumbling with the button and fly. She pushed him away and he made a sound deep his chest that was something like a growl but smoother and more drawn out. Insistently, she pushed him back and stood up, undressing herself with quick, practised efficiency. In a moment she was standing in front of him, all golden brown skin from head to toe, broken only by the lattice of her many scars and the little patch of hair between her legs that had remained its natural black when she coloured the crop on her head.

"Siha..." His voice strained with his want for her and he reached out, pulling her back into his arms. She let him, feeling his hands wander over places where rough, restrictive cloth had separated them before. His fingers traced the surgical scars on her hips, the long jagged track down the back of her right thigh and all the smooth skin in between, leaving tracks of tingling heat in their wake. He kissed her neck, her breasts, drew his tongue along the jagged lines of her scars and dipped it into the divot of her bellybutton, making her giggle as his warm breath tickled her sensitive stomach. As he continued to move lower she realized what he was intending and her head popped up, her hands on his shoulders struggling to bring him back up.

"You don't have to-" She began, her voice breaking when she felt his hand snake up the inside of her thigh and pull her legs gently open. He looked up at her and raised one brow questioningly, not moving back but not pressing forward either. She had the overpowering desire to close her legs, feeling nervous and exposed with her thighs spread wide in front of him like this, but his firm grip and piercing eyes stopped her.

"This is something drell do. I had thought from those vids that humans enjoyed it too." He commented. "I assure you, I have studied all the information Mordin passed me. I know all about the ah," he cleared his throat discreetly, "little man in the boat."

She almost choked, her cheeks flushing brilliant red. "I don't- I mean SOME men do it but you don't have to. I don't expect it. I've never... no one else has ever..." She stopped short, still blushing wildly, a mixture of supreme embarrassment, nerves and pure, raw excitement at everything he was offering. Her stomach fluttered as she vividly remembered the kinds of faces and sounds the women in the vids had made.

He smiled, understanding, and shook his head. "I want to." He assured her, and his hand slid up, off her thigh to her warm, eager centre. She moaned, cupping her hand over her mouth, shuddered, and dropped back against the blankets again. She was not going to fight him, if he really wanted to do this, and as he slid his fingers experimentally against her she felt his other hand gently pull her hand away from her mouth. "And I want to hear you as I do it."

She could not speak so she just nodded, as his fingers effortlessly found the notoriously elusive bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs and stroked it gently. She heard herself make a high, slightly broken sound which was unlike any she normally made and then his lips were on her hips, his tongue snaking across the hard line of bone and down across the flat plain of her belly and lower still to replace his finger and draw another wild, uncontained cry of pleasure from her. She could feel him react to it, to her, as she wrapped her long, powerful legs over his shoulders, one of her hands falling down to the increasingly familiar planes of his skull. As his mouth began to move on her, his long, agile tongue rolling in a way she had never imagined was possible, she began to moan and curse mindlessly, needing some outlet for the amazing sensations that were turning her bones to gel.

One arm folded over her hips, holding her down against the bed as he dipped his tongue down, inside her and the thumb of his other hand moved to take its former place, rubbing small, gentle circles around the aching bundle of nerves. Her mind was erupting with white noise and static, her stomach clenching harder and harder as she hurtled toward her completion and she closed her eyes, unable to stand the way the world spun and shifted around her, hallucinogens or pleasure she could not tell. Her fingers clenched against the ridges of his scales as her legs suddenly tensed and she cried out, gasping, struggling to get more and less at the same time. Her entire body was tight, quivering as the intensity mounted higher and higher and then suddenly, amazingly, it broke and the waves washed over her, making her body tense and relax in little bursts. His tongue slid out of her, caressing the still aching bud in time with the aftershocks of her orgasm, making her whimper and squirm under him. Finally, he drew himself up alongside her, and she threw her arms around his neck and held him close, goose bumps prickling her skin as she became suddenly cold in the aftermath of all that heat.

"Fuck. That was... fuck." She breathed gratefully against the spines of his throat and she heard him chuckle again, his hand flowing down the valley of her waist and over the round swell of her hips. "Wow."

"Indeed." He murmured softly. She looked up at him, one eyebrow raised at the curiously placid expression on his face.

"What is it?" She asked, sitting up slightly. The cold made her skin sing, every sensation amplified ten fold. As she looked down the length of his naked chest she realized that the psychotropic effects of his kisses were stronger than ever, the lightning bolts shooting across his ribcage appearing to shift and move as he resettled himself on the bed, staring up at the stars through the glass ceiling.

"It's nothing." He replied. "I just did not know that human women achieved orgasm so fast. I would have... drawn it out more if I could." He sounded like he was hiding disappointment and she cocked her head to the side. He looked up at her after a moment and tried to make a reassuring face, motioning for her to lay down beside him again.

"Human women can have more than one a night. You know that right?" She asked, a mischievous smile springing to life on her lips. From the look of confusion on his face it was clear that no, he had not known that.

"Among my people, after the woman ah, gets what she wants she generally wants to be left alone or at most, held a little bit before she falls asleep." He said, sitting up and studying her with reanimated interest. "Whether her partner has achieved similar satisfaction or not."

She grinned and moved closer again, straddling his lap and feeling him hard and eager against her. He sighed and closed his eyes halfway as she ran her hands down his hips and tugged at the buckles and straps that held his pants in place. She ran her thumb across one of the slivers of red skin that flanked his black stripes and felt him shiver at the contact, sucking in a sudden breath of air that rasped against her ear.

"Among my people," she whispered against his cheek, "one time is kind of a let-down."

He made that deep, smooth sound in his chest again and with a heave of his hips had flipped her over, tossing her down on the bed. He removed the rest of his clothes in the blink of an eye and while she was still trying to adjust to the swirling, clashing lights of the room around her his body was over her, fabulously naked as he pressed down on her with sudden urgency. All his gentleness, his hesitation, his shy bashfulness was thrown to the winds as she felt him bite down on her neck, his hands gripping her hips and shifting her position under him. He paused only a moment, looking up from her throat to see if she was hesitating or uncomfortable. She pulled his face close and kissed him, sucking his bottom lip in between her teeth and biting down lightly. He grunted, sighed and shifted forward, pressing into her.

The world tilted overhead and she squeezed her eyes closed, her entire body vibrating as she felt him slid into her, filling her in one smooth thrust. His breath was ragged, sharp and hard in the back of his throat as he leant his forehead against her shoulder and began to move, the motion of his hips jerky and short at first as she managed to curl her legs around his waist and her arms around his shoulders and just watched his body moving on top of hers. His hands dropped from her waist to her ass, clenching tight and pulling her up to meet his thrusts as they became longer, a deep groan escaping his lips. Her toes curled as he shifted position only slightly and she felt him move inside her, the pleasure of his movements increasing suddenly tenfold. She gasped, writhing, pressing herself up against him and he closed his teeth around the lobe of her ear, on her neck, down her shoulder, biting and sucking and licking wherever he could.

Sounds spilled out of her, fractured pleas, wordless sounds of pleasure that made him bear down harder, his pace quickening as she heard him begin to gasp against her neck, nearing his completion already. But she was not ready for that, not ready for it to be over and she pushed him off, taking advantage of his distracted state to lever his superior bulk back until he was sprawled on his back. He made a wordless sound of frustration, still grasping for her as she threw her leg over him, straddled his hips and shook her head.

"I don't think so." She chided. "I probably should have mentioned this before, but I like to be in charge."

His gaze was hungry as she took her time looking down his long, muscular body, at the parts of him she had not had time to examine in the height of his lust. The patterns that flanked his abdomen thinned dramatically on the flat place just above his organ, winding into a single knot of black against the dramatic green of his skin. The skin below was vibrant red like it was on his neck, spreading down the inside of his thighs a ways and when she touched him there he moaned and threw his head back, closing his eyes. The scales on his knees and shins were large and solid like they were on his face, but otherwise it was the same soft, snake-like green scales, accented here and there by individual stripes of black from his hips to his ankles. She could not remember having been more attracted to anyone, and she ran her hands over the shifting lightning bolts of his ribcage, moving down and caressing his sensitive abdomen until she gripped his length and guided him back inside her.

She closed her eyes as she began to move, the heightened pleasure of control mixing with the breathing walls and dancing light of the stars to an intensity that made her dizzy otherwise. She heard him moan and his hands found her hips, guiding her as she rolled back and forth and then began to tense her thighs and move up and down in the same motion. He gasped, his entire body tensing so powerfully she could feel it move through her and cracked one eye open, needing to see his face. He was staring up at her, his dark eyes devouring the movement of her small breasts, the curves of her body, the point of their joining and he moved one of his hands to touch her there, making her moan loudly and increase her speed as her pleasure began to mount immediately.

"Ah, Siha, faster. Please." He moaned, his back arching as he threw his head back again, his eyes closing. She smiled her satisfaction, one hand gripping her own breast, the other braced against his chest as she increased her speed only the slightest bit. He made a wordless, guttural sound of frustration and thrust desperately up into her. Her other hand fell to his chest and she moved faster still, his moans increasing with every twitch of her hips, every sound he made as sweet as music to her ears. There was something burning inside her, deep in the pit of her stomach, stronger even then what he had done to her with that oh so talented tongue of his and she moaned her name for him as their movements grew steadily harder, faster, more frantic as they both reached the final stretch, aching muscles carried forward by the momentum of their coupling and nothing more.

Even with the psychedelic twist of the world making her dizzy and disoriented she had to open her eyes fully, to really see him as he thrashed and writhed under her. He looked up, his dark eyes finding hers and drew her down, their mouths crashing together, tongues tangling as she felt the second wave break over her, making her shudder and tremble, her hands clenching tight against his chest. His answer came a moment later, a soft roar torn loose from his throat, his fingers on her hip digging into her skin slightly as his back arched and she felt the warmth of his release filling her. He slumped back after a long, trembling moment and sighed, one of his hands coming to his forehead and resting there as he shook himself slightly, the lacquered look to his dark eyes making him seem almost drunk. She smiled and slid off him, sprawling across the bed in similar satisfied exhaustion.

"I was expecting everything to be more drawn out." She said later, as he curled up against her back and looped one arm gently around her waist, holding her close. He laughed, a sound she could feel vibrating in the depths of his chest and into her. "The extranet made sex with a drell sound like a marathon. I got lotion for chafing and everything."

"That's more because of the women then the men." He mused softly, his fingers tracing the indent of her bellybutton in a way that was already becoming familiar. She had already made it clear that constantly playing with her breasts was not appropriate afterglow behaviour, which seemed to disappoint him somewhat. "The same could be said of pretty much all parts of drell intimacy. It isn't as balanced as it is among humans."

She made a face at him. "Human sexuality is balanced? You heard me say that I'd never had oral sex before right? Guess how many times I've given it."

He laughed, nuzzling into her hair. "I've never had it either. Guess how many times I've given it."

She grinned at him, one dark eyebrow raised over her luminous eyes, glowing orange in the dim light as they always did. She could see perfectly fine, though the world had a somewhat ruddy sheen to it, like firelight in the darkness. "I can fix that for you." She whispered, wickedly.

He made a face that she recognized as shocked and excited at the same time and shifted drawing her tighter against him.

"Unfortunately, once a night is entirely on par for drell. It will be several hours until I can… perform again." He really did sound disappointed, but she just sighed and snuggled back against him, putting her head down on the pillows and inhaling the warm, spicy scent of him.

"That's fine. We've got time." She replied. Her eyelids felt heavy, the rigour of their coupling and the release of so much pent up stress and downright, dirty horniness having taken all the energy right out of her. Nothing was fixed, all the same problems and doubts waited for her outside of this little cocoon of warmth they had created under her sheets. Right now though, all that seemed so far away, something she could deal with later. "Why don't you put some music on?" She murmured sleepily.

He did, something soft and mellow as drell music tended to be. In the background, past the sighs of the wood instruments she could hear a clear, crystalline tolling. Bells. Before she realized what was happening Shepard was asleep, dreaming of the bells, the sweet green meadows and clean air of Mindoir. For once, things were that simple.


	14. 14

_The impermanent has no reality; reality lies in the eternal. Those who have seen the boundary between these two have attained the end of all knowledge. Realize that which pervades the universe and is indestructible; no power can affect this unchanging, imperishable reality. The body is mortal, but he who dwells in the body is immortal and immeasurable. Therefore, Arjuna, fight in this battle._

_One man believes he is the slayer, another believes he is the slain. Both are ignorant; there is neither the slayer nor the slain. You were never born; you will never die. You have never changed; you can never change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do not die when the body dies. Realizing that which is indestructible, eternal, unborn, and unchanging, how can you slay another or cause another to slay?_

_-The Bhagavad Gita_

"Batarians do not surrender to humans." The gruff voice over the intercom cracked with hysteria, the flashing red lights all around them transforming the narrow, sterile hall they were fighting their way down into a hellish nightmare of a place. The pirates, the best of anything they had fought out here but still mostly useless, were churning in the hallway ahead, crashing into each other, not at all prepared for the tightly coordinated teamwork that closed fighting entailed. "We will kill you all! Retreat while I'm feeling merciful!"

And so on. Such posturing was beneath the notice of Commander Shepard as Tali blew a hole in one of the ventilation tubes lining the walls and a geyser of white steam erupted among their attackers. They kicked and shouted, flailing their arms in a vain attempt at sight while the three invaders stood stalk still in the centre of the hallway picking them off with an air of definite boredom. Some of them cursed and screamed, some of them fought with a quiet determination that made Shepard think under different circumstances, in a different world maybe, they could have been real fighters. Regardless of such thoughts, they needed to die, and she killed them without regret.

"How's it going on your end, Garrus?" She asked, pressing her radio closer to her ear to block out peripheral noise from her M-6 as it blew the face off a man six feet away. Jack let out a savage, trilling war cry as she chambered another shot and then decided to smash her opponents face in with the butt of her gun as he managed to claw his way out of the billowing steam. The communications channel crackled for a moment and then she could hear the turian give a brusque, slightly garbled order before he answered.

"They had a guy with an Avalanche." He replied, an explosion going off somewhere in the background. Shepard lowered her gun as the last pirate was violently thrown back, bouncing off the ceiling and then off the floor and back to the ceiling at a single, well-placed blast of biotic energy from Jack. The other woman hooted and raised both hands above her head.

"Five points!" She declared.

"Three." Shepard argued. "One for every bounce."

"Plus two for style." Jack replied, crossing her arms stubbornly. Shepard sighed and let her have it, and the other woman smirked happily and typed at her omnitool. Shepard shuddered to think of the kind of things that the other woman used to tally her arbitrarily awarded points.

"Are you in trouble?" Shepard asked. Before she had started using cryo weapons she had always thought them to be just another form of military witchcraft, fine for certain situations but really not on par with a few grenades in the right places. They were so frowned upon by the Council that she rarely encountered them anyway. Since coming to the Terminus Systems she could fully understand why they were treated with such distaste by any society that loved law and order.

"Of course not, it was no problem." Garrus sounded as bored as her, and a small smile touched her lips. "Krios got him before the bastard could even reload the thing. But that was pretty much the most interesting thing I could say. Things here are like they always are when we do this, Shepard."

"Roger that. You finish clearing out the engine rooms and we'll eliminate the bridge crew." She popped open the security console by the final door sealing them from the captain and a few officer-rank staff.

"Yeah, yeah, I know the drill. Are you going to come play poker with us tonight?" Garrus asked. She could hear a short burst of assault rifle fire on his end as she fiddled with the last few circuits, then silence. She paused for a moment, wondering why she was getting this invitation from him, and then remembered that bypassing a door was not exactly something she could take her time on. She swore as the circuits sparked and sizzled under her fingers.

"Not tonight. I have some things I need to do." She replied, sticking her tongue out between her teeth as she squinted at the surprisingly complex contraption. "But I'll take a rain check. Since when do you come to poker night anyway?"

"Since Tali started inviting me." He replied, sounding smug. Shepard glanced over her shoulder at the quarian who was studiously examining the ceiling and walls in a fashion that made it impossible to catch her eyes. She allowed herself a silent and extremely satisfied smirk. The holopad projected over the doorway flashed from red to green as she finished her bypass and she stood, slapping her shotgun into both hands.

"We've got to get going, so I'll have to make suggestive comments and waggle my eyebrows later." She said, swinging her head from side to side in order to crack her neck.

"Looking forward to it." Garrus replied. She laughed, and hit the holopad to allow them access to the final stage of their cleansing effort.

"We surrender!" The captain shouted, as they entered with guns drawn. Tali and Jack immediately moved out on either side of her, shotguns out. Together they formed a perfect trinity of close-combat slaughter, as evidenced by their bloody battle to this room and the trail of corpses it had produced. The only people remaining were the captain, a pale and somewhat sickly looking batarian and his cloister of what amounted to executive officers on pirate vessels. Or so she thought, they were as dirty and lice-ridden as the foot soldiers they had blown apart in their effort to reach this room, so it was hard to really tell if they were anything more that the grunts that happened to be on hand when the captain lost his nerve.

As her companions directed the officers to their knees, hands folded over their heads, Shepard beckoned the captain forward. He came, his stride faltering as she hefted the heavy barrel of her gun onto her shoulder and fixed him with her eternally eclipsing eyes, the ring of orange light circling blackness. He bowed his head after a moment, incapable of keeping her gaze. "I don't suppose I have to tell you that this is an unconditional surrender?"

"Batarian battle customs make certain demands of a captain." The man replied, sounding little more than tired and run down now that he knew it was over. "But I would rather be a living coward then a glorious corpse, so unconditional surrender suits me just fine. What do you want?"

"I want all the information stored in your computers about who you're smuggling red sand for and where it's going." She replied. "I want your navigational charts and histories, I want your ship and all your weapons and armour. I want all your money and I also want to jettison all dangerous contraband and narcotics."

The captain gaped at her for a moment, running his hand over his skull. "And where does this leave me? Are you just going to toss my crew and I out an airlock to take our ship?"

"I don't really care what happens to you, captain. You may take the onboard shuttle from this ship and depart with no weapons or credits to go wherever you wish. You may choose to face justice on Ikor, the nearest colonized planet you have victimized or I can take you to stand before the Alliance on smuggling charges. It's really up to you." She turned to see that Jack and Tali had finished binding the surrendered officers and securing their confiscated weapons. She nodded in their directions. "My friends will make sure you're comfortable while you talk it over with your crew."

Words seemed to fail him. Tali had to grab his arm and drag him back to join the rest of his crewmates, who started jabbering nervously in his direction at once. Shepard went to the command console and unlocked all the doors in ship to facilitate Garrus' cleanup of the lower decks and began establishing a connection for EDI. After a moment, Tali appeared at her side. With their hands and legs bound Jack was more than capable of keeping control of their captives. She held her shotgun braced lazily against her hip, dark eyes monitoring the situation with a sort of bored amusement.

"You're looking good, Shepard. Well rested." The quarian commented, trying for casual conversation and folding her hands in front of herself/ Shepard was watching as the screens flashed and EDI began draining the systems of all vital information, columns of data shifting by much to fast for an organic eye to follow. She glanced up, her fingers leaving the keyboard and leaned back against the console as they waited for the AI to finish her downloads. It was, as ever, impossible to read the other woman's facial expressions, but she could hear the note of concern underlying the statement.

"I'm… handling it." She replied after a moment. "I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about a lot of things, but I've figured some stuff out. I've got it under control." She met the other woman's eyes, her gaze level and controlled, her eyes completely clear for the first time in weeks. The weight of the galaxy rested on her shoulders, on the undeniably powerful but ultimately fragile and impermanent woman that existed behind the mantle of Galactic Saviour. She was not sure if there was a point where it would break her, where she would prove ultimately unable to carry the burdens that had been heaped upon her. But if there was a limit, she had not found it yet. She was not finished. "I'm going to be fine."

Tali seemed to visibly relax after a moment, her hands falling away from their nervous fidgeting and Shepard could see her luminous eyes tilt up under the mask in the way they did when she smiled. After months of trying to persuade everyone that she was not going to fall apart at any moment, it seemed she had finally succeeded. When the console beeped a moment later, Shepard grinned and clapped the young machinist on the shoulder, as EDI's white orb reappeared.

"Data mine is complete, Shepard." The AI intoned. "I have accessed transactions between this group and several other groups smuggling in the surrounding fringe systems. They seem to be working for Eclipse." Shepard nodded, pulling her helmet out and rubbing at the sweat-matted curls that covered her head. Everything seemed to be progressing in a reasonable sense. She could already see the many different ways she could work all this to her advantage, her agile mind shifting through different situations and consequences with ease.

"Let's stick to the fringe systems for now." She decided finally. As much as she was itching to go and fight someone who knew what a scope was for it would be foolish of her to rush headlong into a major crime syndicate out here, where there was no backup and nowhere to retreat should things go awry. This was time for patience and calculated strategy, building strength and moving forward only after the back position was fortified. It would all pay off when the Reapers showed up, she was sure. "We'll cut them off from some profit and get them to come to us."

"Acknowledged. I shall update the galaxy map. In addition, I have discovered that the destination for much of this red sand is indeed Council space, and I have acquired the names of several buyers and corrupt customs officials." The AI chimed. Shepard glanced over at the captain who was looking pale and resigned as his crew members continued to argue among themselves. Jack glanced in their direction and shook her head with a look of disgust. They were going to have to do some real fighting soon.

"Send a list of the names and a copy of the data to Councillor Anderson." She instructed. "He can share the information and deal with the perpetrators as he sees fit."

"Acknowledged. Logging out." EDI replied, before the console went dim and Shepard strode back to her captives.

"Have you made your decision?" She asked.

"We have, human." It was not the captain but some member of his surrounding officers that spoke, spitting the name of her species over her boots like it was a curse. Shepard felt her lip curl in instant distaste and ignored him, staring instead at the captain who was involved in a detailed examination of his knees where they were braced against the steel floor.

"We choose death before the cowardly fates you offer. Batarians do not go to prison." She finally looked up to him when it became obvious that the captain was utterly broken and would not respond to anything she said or did at this point. Her gaze was pointed and fierce as she turned, only slightly, to face the much younger and braver crew mate.

"Death was not an option I offered." She replied flatly.

"We demand it!" The batarian insisted, struggling to stand and failing since his ankles had been securely strapped together. He hissed in frustration. "This indignity is unacceptable! If your kind knew anything about nobility you would have killed us the moment this coward said he would accept an unconditional surrender."

Shepard made a disgusted sound before she turned away, tapping at her radio to contact Garrus. "Take the shuttle then. If you want death, it should be easy enough for you to seek it on your own terms. I won't be dragged into it."

The batarian gaped at her, then lowered his head, laughing dully in his chest. "The Butcher of Torfan refusing to kill batarians. It's a story to tell the grandchildren." He mused bitterly. It was intended to enrage her, she knew that even as she stopped and felt her hand clench into a tight fist. Two years ago she would have shot someone for making a comment like that, she knew. At the moment she could imagine nothing sweeter than pistol whipping the bastard, and maybe kicking him a couple time for good measure.

After a moment she moved away, ignoring him again, and spoke into her radio.

"How are you guys doing?" She asked.

"Fine, fine." Came the dry, resonate voice of the second team lead. "How was storming the bridge?"

"It was good. They surrendered." She replied, grinning at his conversational tone. Although nervous at first, perhaps because of what had happened to his team on Omega, Garrus had been nervous about becoming the second assault team captain in the few situations where two were needed. His confidence had returned quickly after the Collector Base had been destroyed, however, and now he led a team with the same powerful confidence that Shepard recognized in herself. It made her very proud to see him do so well, but she had never told him that outright. It would just make him nervous again.

"Fancy that." She could hear him grinning through the audio chip installed in her helmet and grinned back. "Cocktails in the shuttle then?"

"I'll meet you there." She replied, laughing. Whatever additional barbs the mouthy crew member tried to throw at her, Shepard barely heard them. By the time they made it down to the shuttle bay with their captives he had given up entirely and his chin sagged against his chest, his eyes on the ground as they were shepherded up the ramp into their tiny little ship. There were only enough seats for four, so most of them had to stand, slightly bent over, and looking around the barren little thing with large, hopeless eyes.

"How is this less cruel than just shooting us?" He tried one last time, before the ramp pulled up.

"People have survived worse circumstances than yours." Shepard replied, crossing her arms over her chest. "Have faith."

He laughed at her, and the door closed. They watched as the ship slid through the flickering wall of violet energy shields that prevented the vacuum from sucking the air out of the shuttle bay when the enormous door opened wide, yawning out onto the void. Shepards skin itched as she waited for it to close, never comfortable with the darkness of space leering like a great black mouth so near and unguarded. Jack sighed and rubbed her head.

"Gotta say, Shepard. It seems kinda cold. No food or water, no guns to protect themselves." She admitted. "That's not like you, not like Robin Hood."

"Or a White Knight." Tali cut in helpfully. Both of them turned and raised an eyebrow at her. She shrugged. "What? That's what they've been calling you on the vids, recently." She nodded in Shepard's direction. "The White Knight of the Terminus Systems. Fighting injustice, defending the weak and spreading the wealth throughout the lowest denominations of society. And, you know, because you wear white armour."

Shepard paused, her eyes deep in thought. "The White Knight of the Terminus Systems?" She asked, tasting the words as she spoke them. After a moment she shrugged. "Beats the Butcher of Torfan, at least. Than again, even Robin Hood beats that. In any event, I don't really care what they call me. Those men made a choice to butcher and steal, to take everything from everyone they came across. I don't know what will happen to them, out there, anymore than they ever knew what would happen to the orphans and widows they left with nothing after every attack. This is-" She stopped herself before she said it, before she dropped that little word that had been kicking around in her mind more and more lately. Karma. Cosmic justice. "This is the only option they gave me. I would have gladly taken them to prison, but that's not what they wanted. They chose to put themselves in the position where I would have to attack them, they chose to surrender, and they chose their fate."

After a moment Jack shrugged. "I would have killed them, like they asked." She said, sounding like the whole thing did not really matter that much, which was true.

"I don't kill people who have surrendered." Shepard replied, pulling up her omnitool. She surfed the next destinations available as they waited for Garrus' team to make its way back up to them. When they appeared, none of them really looking like they had even been in a fight at all, they all clambered back into the shuttle and set off toward the Normandy again. A basic crew would be split from the staff and assigned to pilot the new ship to whatever colony Shepard decided to give it to. But first, as she had said, she had some things to do.

"EDI? Engage a gravitational tow line on the ship and put it in orbit around the moon alongside the Normandy." She instructed as they sailed through the door and into open space. From here the Normandy looked tiny, a sliver of tin floating above an enormous world, that looked tiny itself in the limitless expanse of cold lights twinkling around it. In the distance, the light of the great yellow star Surya was the only thing that did not seem insignificant. But that was perhaps only because it was shining so hard in her eyes.

"Of course Shepard. Did you want me to have the supplies you requested prepared for you when the shuttle docks?" The AI asked, always helpful.

"That would be fine, thank you." She replied, tapping the radio to signal the end of discussion as she always did. It was a decidedly unmilitary habit that she had none the less picked up during command school, during combat simulations so fast and realistic that words proved to be a major waste of time.

"Supplies?" Garrus asked, flaring his mandibles. "Where are we going now?"

"I'm going back." She replied, staring out the window at the planet below them. "Down there. Just for two days. I have… I have some things I need to do."

There was silence in the shuttle and Shepard looked down as she felt a hand on hers, then up into the large black eyes of the hands owner, who was regarding her with undisguised tenderness. She felt a blush prickle her cheek and fought her urge to shy away, to be discreet among others. It had been so long since she had the freedom to be open about any of her feelings that it felt somehow wrong, as though it would be weak and unseemly to show affection in front of her crew. She had already told Thane that she needed to do this, though she had been unable to explain what exactly this was. A pilgrimage of sorts. A duty. Whatever the name for it, she knew she could not turn her back to the planet of Mindoir until she did what she had to do. After a moment she wrapped her hand around his and smiled gently, under the lip of reflective glass that obscured most of her face.

Then, she kicked Garrus in the shin for flaring his mandibles a little too cheekily at her when she met his eyes again. His swearing made them all laugh as the Normandy opened her doors for them and they sailed gracefully back to the ship that had somehow managed become a home for each of them in the recent months.

"I thought you were going to make suggestive comments and waggle your eyebrows at me." Garrus said as they clambered down the ramp. Shepard saw that a small bundle of the promised supplies had been left for her, wrapped in rain proof tarps and tied with neat, military knots. The absence of any human hands that might have done this was somewhat strange, as it made it seem almost like EDI had placed the bundles there herself. She put a hand on her friends shoulder and grinned at him.

"Don't worry, I'll have plenty of time to mercilessly tease you and pry out all the undoubtedly delicious details." She assured him. He rolled his dark eyes, a gesture he had picked up from spending so much time around other species, she assumed, since she had never seen another turian do it.

"I can't wait. Just remember that I'm not the one that disappeared for almost twenty hours at the exact same time as a certain green assassin." He replied. "I'm sure I'll get all sorts of blackmail material myself."

"Nope. I'm solid as a rock, Alliance-grade anti-interrogation training and everything." She thumped her chest plate with one hand as Thane approached, carrying two of the bundles of supplies and giving them a strange look, one of the scaled ridges over his eyes arching in question. Garrus narrowed his eyes at her and said nothing, but she could tell this was not the end of their conversation.

"I wish you weren't going alone." Thane said, once the other crew members had left. He set the bundles down in the back of the shuttle and stood beside her as she pulled her helmet off. His dark eyes searched hers as she tossed the thing on the seat and faced him, trying to look confident despite her insecurity. After a moment of it not working, at least not against him, she sighed and her shoulders relaxed visibly.

"I can't explain it to you right now, Rama, at least not any better than I already have. This is just something I need to do, and I have to do it alone." She said. She had said the exact same thing to him as they got dressed a few hours ago, hurriedly slapping on clothing after EDI had informed them that the pirate ship had just entered the system and was making its way toward the planet. "I grew up on Mindoir. I know what I'm doing. I'll be fine."

He nodded after a moment. "I know you will." He said, leaning forward to kiss her. She wound her arms around his neck and leaned into him, trying to keep her shifting plates from pinching him as he ran his fingers through her damp hair and held her close for a long moment, apparently not caring if they did. After too short a time they parted and he walked down the ramp, his hand falling down her arm, tracing her palm and the length of her long fingers before they finally parted and the door began to swing closed. The auto pilot engaged, lifting the vessel from the floor and she sat down heavily, running her hands through her hair. She spent the journey down getting out of her armour, although she knew it was unwise to spend time on a planet as uncharted as Mindoir in civilian clothes, she also knew her armour would just get in the way of everything she had to do down there.

A lot of hard work was waiting for her, there among the distant mountains and silent streets that had once been home.


	15. 15

_The Self cannot be pierced by weapons or burned by fire; water cannot wet it, nor can the wind dry it. The Self cannot be pierced or burned, made wet or dry. It is everlasting and infinite, standing on the motionless foundations of eternity. The Self is unmanifested, beyond all thought, beyond all change. Knowing this you should not grieve._

_The glory of the Self is beheld by a few, and few describe it; a few listen, but many without understanding. The Self of all beings, living within the body, is eternal and cannot be harmed. Therefore, do not grieve._

_-The Bhagavad Gita_

She had forgotten, in her long sojourn among the stars, exactly what it was like to spend time in a place where the environment was not maintained by machines. The bright summery days of the Presidium were still and mild, the unchanging sun never hot, the illustrated clouds never throwing any cooler shadows. The bellies of ships were much the same, if less grand. Whatever temperature was comfortable, whatever dryness or humidity was desired, could be programmed into the computer and made a constant reality. As she touched down on Mindoir, the sun just beginning to cast the first rosy lights of dawn over the peaks of the distant western mountains, she felt the bite of nights coolness still pervading the air and realized she had forgotten to bring a sweater. Thinking back, she realized that she did not even own one. Shivering, she unpacked the bundles of supplies and strapped her M-6 into a civilian holster. The rest of her weapons and armour she packed into one of the storage cupboards aboard the shuttle before she sent it back up to the Normandy.

To her left the stain of their fire still marked the earth, and as she shouldered her packs and started walking she could smell a faint reek beginning to emanate from the broken down back door of the town hall. Gritting her teeth, she quickened her pace and headed down for the main road of the settlement on the bottom of the hill. She still was not sure exactly how she was going to do all that she needed to do in just two days, but it seemed like a good enough place to start.

Hours passed with no indication but the slow crawl of the sun overhead. She remembered that Mindoir had thirty-five hour days, the arch of the sun overhead slow and languid, the blistering heat of mid afternoon making the hard lifting and carrying of the morning hours impossible. She let the last bundle of dry wood fall to the ground and groaned, stretching her aching shoulders as she stared up and down the little street. Tufts of hand-sized, five petal flowers were everywhere, although beautiful they would cause an unsightly rash if she tried to pick them. Retrieving a bottle of water from her supplies she left the stacking and tying of wood for the afternoon and headed up into the meadows, toward the orchards in the far north-west of their fields.

She laughed at the sight of the Dekkum, rabbit-sized, three-legged mammalian creatures that were leaping through the long grass, making shrill chirping noises at each other. As she passed they paid her no mind, skittering away if she came to close but otherwise ignoring her almost entirely. There were no predators in the mountains, only a few poisonous plants and a stinging lichen. They had never had any reason to fear anything. As she made her way into the cool shade of the trees, the faint, sickly-sweet aroma of rotting fruit carrying on the sweet breeze wafting down from the snow-capped peaks overhead, she breathed a sigh of relief seeing the long blooming vines and carpets of speckled blue and yellow flowers underfoot. The flowers were important, and she doubted any of the dry reserves put in by the widows all those years ago had held together.

She sat in the shade, eating one of the ripe plums she had found still clinging to the lower branches and began making garlands, her fingers easily remembering where exactly to push the needle to keep each blossom securely fastened, and yet keep every petal in place. Her thoughts wandered during this mild, almost pleasant work in the cool, fragrant meadows with even the ominous stain of the haunted settlement obscured by the branches of the trees. It was easy to forget the distasteful nature of her task here, where the air was so sweet and clear, where only the beauty of Mindoir displayed itself for the world to see. She must have sat for hours, though the sun barely moved and the sun-baked meadows beyond shimmered in the blistering heat. Eventually, since she was alone, she took off her black shirt and pants, kicked off her boots and sprawled in the cool grass amidst the long bands of interlinked flowers, inhaling their smooth, sweet scents. The light filtering through the leaves above was so shockingly familiar it was almost easy to believe she would hear her brothers calling at any moment, or see them skitter through the branches overhead.

She never knew what had become of Rajan and Timir, or any of her family really. Anderson had told her they were dead, gunned down in the fields by batarian slavers as a last cruel act of defiance. But she knew that he really did not know what had become of them, many of the chosen slaves had been loaded onto the shuttles and abducted by the time the Alliance touched down. They could still be alive out there, in batarian space, slaves in some mineral mine or servants in a savage household of violent aliens. She had long ago abandoned any hope of ever finding them.

How easy it was to lie here and let her thoughts wander back to them now. She had not thought of them with any detail in years; had not even thought of their names, had never called their faces into her mind and reflected on how much she looked like them. They had been three of a kind in a way siblings seldom were outside of tiny, isolated communities such as this, best friends despite the seven years spackled between their births. She could almost hear their voices, gruff with the passage of years, in the back of her mind.

She COULD hear voices.

Shepard sat up abruptly, reaching for her gun in the grass beside her. They were coming from far off, carrying over the flatness of the rolling meadows. She was on her feet, pulling her clothing on, when they finally materialized into real words.

"This goddamn shitting heat is killing me." Someone was saying, and from the deep timbre and vibration of the words she could tell it was a batarian. She pulled her shirt on and buckled her boots before she went slinking forward, seeking a thicker patch of underbrush to provide cover while she searched for the source of the voices. She tapped at her omnitool, sending a message to the Normandy to alert them of what was going on. The reply came a moment later.

'We are engaged with a hostile ship, Shepard. Help will be dispatched as soon as possible, but evasive maneuvers are advised.' A cold chill settled at the base of her spine. She had been down here fourteen hours. What was going on here?

"Settle down." A harsh command from a voice she recognized with icy dread. The angry young officer she had just jettisoned from the ship. What were they doing down here? What did they have to gain from tramping around a planet defined only by its propensity for venomous flora and fauna, and a steadily mounting host of skeletons? "We'll be off this rock as soon as Eclipse deals with those do-gooders overhead. They should have cut and run when they had the chance."

There was a murmur of agreement, punctuated by the continuing irate swearing of the overheated member as the group crested the small hill overhead. She could see them through a break in the branches and crouched down lower, keeping herself as submerged among the undergrowth as possible. The captain was not among them, and that did not surprise Shepard in the least bit, and the mouthy officer seemed to have replaced him, standing at the head of the column and scanning the tree line.

"I don't see anyone." Someone volunteered unhelpfully. The officer turned to stare at him and the man quieted.

"Someone dumped those supplies and that big fucking pile of wood in the middle of that road. Someone is here." The leader pointed out as though explaining something to small child. "Doing god knows what. Since there is only ONE ship in the area it bears assuming that one of her crew is that someone doing god knows what. Since we want to kill everyone, it therefore makes sense to look for this person and smash their head in."

She squinted as they began their descent toward the trees, wishing that all batarians could be as stupid as the sheepish looking one walking drag. They would find her here for sure, and she turned, beating a stealthy, hasty retreat only possible because she had spent so many hours playing hide and seek among these very same trees. Cold sweat was pouring down her back.

So they were working for Eclipse. They must have gotten the captain to call them up and warn them about what was going on when Shepard had kicked them off the ship. She swore inwardly, her jaw clenching as she pressed her back against a tree and took a few long breaths. She had seen the glint of metal in their hands, guns salvaged from the corpses in the town hall no doubt. No armour, so she had a fighting chance, but she had not kept her armour either. She had been so distracted by everything going inside her head that she had never considered the fact that her enemy may not be as stupid as she gave them credit for being.

And now she was most probably fucked.

She sent another message to the Normandy, advising them of the upgrade in her urgency and received no reply. An Eclipse ship was no fringe pirate troop of slovenly petty criminals. They would know how to fight, and though she was confident her crew would be able to eliminate them, it would take time. Until then, she was definitely on her own.

She could hear them begin to crash through the underbrush and growled. There was only so much orchard to hide in, eventually she would reach the other end and then there would be nothing but barren meadows stretching for half a kilometre or more in every direction. She would be totally exposed and without protection, easy pickings for even the most inept of snipers. She pressed herself against the bark and glanced back, the rustling and crunching of bushes far behind her the only indication of movement. They seemed to have fanned out slightly, searching in a wide swath rather than all tramping along together. She swore softly, and began picking her way from tree to tree, scuttling along in a half crouch wherever she could use bushes or clusters of fern for cover.

She had to wipe her hand and readjust her grip on her M-6 as she reached the end of the column. There were only nine of them now, without the captain, and they were spread about ten feet apart as they picked their way through roots and over fallen trees in the overgrown trees. She waited, pressed behind a thick apple tree as the nearest one came closer and closer, his rifle swaying from side to side as he only half-scanned the trees before him. Like the others, he was none to convinced that it was necessary to comb the place as thoroughly as their new captain insisted. She could hear his boots crunching in the stillness, ten feet away, then seven, six, five. She would have to act soon, be quick and quiet, muffle the blast into his body or try to collapse his trachea before he could shout. She had been trained to do it, even if she never had and he was without the usual chin guards or impact resistant Kevlar. Her entire body tensed, charged with violent energy as she waited.

Someone cried out from the other end of the orchard, perhaps finding her garlands and she heard him shift, turning toward the sound, his back to her. She struck, swinging around the tree and slamming her knee into his, crumpling his leg. As he fell she caught his scream, slamming her hand over his jaw and wrenching, using his falling momentum to crack his neck. She kept her hand firmly in place to muffle the gurgle of his death and then lowered his body slowly to the ground. She stopped, listening intently.

No one seemed to have heard anything. She could hear distant arguing, something about wasting time, hunger, heat, and moved forward while they were still distracted. Eight left. Eight batarians against one human woman, even if that woman was Commander Shepard, were not odds she liked. The next batarian appeared around the bend of a tree, gun slung carelessly against his side as he waited for an order to come from the bickering higher officers. She slid forward in a slick, deadly panic. Fear was screaming in her ears, telling her that at any moment he was going to turn around and blow a hole in her from crotch to neck. She was not Thane, trained in the art of silent death, she had only adrenaline and survival instinct keeping her alive. Still, he did not turn and she clamped her hand over his mouth as the muzzle of her M-6 buried itself in his spine and squeezed off a single shot that lost itself in the closeness of the forest and the noisy fighting. She lowered the second body to the ground and took off again, her hand now streaked with the strange pinkish blood he had spat over her hand as he died. Seven to one. Her odds were getting better.

It sounded like the new captain had finally closed the argument, and that they were moving forward again. She fell back a little, putting herself behind her next target. EDI had advised evasive maneuvers but there was no time for playing hide and seek, waiting for them to inevitably find her. She had to start evening the odds, even if doing so made her stomach feel like it was boiling. As the third back appeared before her she sighed and took a deep breath, focusing her mind. Hesitation here would kill her.

She would have her panic attack after everyone else was dead.

She heard the stick turn under her foot, and the tiny snap it made, as she zeroed in on him. He was turning, his voice rising in the first tentative notes of alarm when her hand shot out and slammed into his windpipe, collapsing the delicate tube in on itself and cancelling his report as he instantly began to choke. She slammed him backwards, into a tree and punched him once in the gut. As he doubled over she raised her gun and slammed it into the back of his skull. He fell over dead.

The damage was done though, as she heard his companions begin calling out to him, wondering what was going on. She retreated back, into a thick patch of spiny bushes, ignoring the long white tracks its thorns left on her arms. Momentary discomfort was acceptable for this kind of cover. She was grateful for it when the nearest of his companions emerged, ludicrously alone, in the small area between trees where she had left the body. As he stared down in mute amazement, she put a bullet between his eyes, the detonation of the gun cracking through the otherwise quiet orchard like thunder. As it echoed through the distant meadows she heard the crunching of the other approaching batarians stop and then resume again, instantly more cautious and slow. She swore, and retreated to another patch of thick undergrowth, further away and crouched down on her stomach, looking for boots around the pair of bodies she could just barely see. A pair appeared, and then another. She could handle two.

"Yeah, both of 'em are dead." She could hear someone report as she pushed herself back to her knees, still crouching down. "No sign of anyone outside of a bullet hole and a broken neck." He paused, hand pressed to his ear as his partner scanned the overgrown paths between the trees for their elusive stalker.

She had never used a warp burst on an opponent who was not sheathed in heavy armour, and the sounds he made as blue fire tore him apart made her sure that she never wanted to use it again. Even as she sank three bullets into his companion, she was already turning to put one in him just so he would stop that terrible, terrible shrieking. The thing that slumped back, exploding open from every seam, and was lost among the fronds of fern and bush resembled nothing living. She fought the stale, acrid taste of vomit that threatened to climb up the back of her throat as she moved steadily further back, trying to keep some idea of where her remaining hunters were. They had stopped moving for the moment and she breathed deep, a sigh of relief as she paused to catch her breath.

"We know its you, Shepard." The voice startled her, it was so close. She had thought that they would be in front of her, and far to her right. But they sounded like they were right beside her and she turned, fleeing with quick and mostly silent steps. She hoped they were like most people who worked on ships, woefully unaware of what it took to maneuver over real ground. "Who else could take down six of my men down like that? Fuck, and when you didn't even have the decency to give us a clean death when we asked for one. Well that can go both ways, bitch. Don't count on a bullet to the brainstem when we get our hands on you."

She had not been, but hearing it put a fresh thrill of fear in her. Even though the day was still blistering hot, she was shivering when she popped her thermal clip and slid another into her gun. She had left most of her clips with the rest of her supplies, down in the settlement. Twelve shots left, for three pissed off batarian pirates. That should be easy right?

She glanced around the tree she was using as cover as she heard them moving forward again, as silently as they could but still not as quiet as her. She had advantages they simply did not, and decided to use them as she flitted between the trees to try and work her way behind them again.

They were on to her though, staying close together in a triangle formation as they moved through the trees. Any time she tried to line up a shot she realized she could not afford to compromise her position. One of the others would get a bullet in her, eventually. At the very least they would get into cover, and force her into a shootout that she did not have the ammo to afford. Swearing to herself, she continued to circle them and they continued to hunt her, held in check mostly by their captains unwavering hatred of her and the patience it was building in him.

"I wasn't always a pirate, you know." He started speaking, his way of letting her know he knew she was out there, moving just beyond his vision. She ignored his attempts to draw her out and kept ducking under the bushes, sneaking between trees and trying to lure him into some clearing where they would be exposed and give her the upper hand. "Once, I was a farmer. Batarians have those too, did you know? We grew something very similar to these strange sweet things you love so much. I was happy there, but my brother always wanted to see the stars. Adventure, you know?"

She frowned, peeking around the tree she was crouched behind as the trio crashed through the bushes fifteen feet off, making a wide arch as they headed due north. They must have been at this for hours, the light was beginning to slant as the sun sank lower in the eastern sky, heading for the jagged horizon. As much as he tried to keep his voice level and confident, Shepard could tell that this little speech was just an expression of his growing impatience. Better to let it simmer.

"He signed up with a ship as soon as he was old enough to pass for someone who was old enough to be of use in space. Wasn't particularly good at it, but it so happened that he showed up at just the right time for an amateur. The Terminus Systems were going to war, the Blitz as your people call it, against the Alliance. We were going to burn your pitiful planets and enslave you all." He laughed, bitterness dripping from every syllable. "And you beat us. Fair enough. You held out, and we retreated, and you followed us to punish us as was your right by every military law."

She could see where this was going, and it lit a fire in her chest that it was shockingly difficult to control. Torfan again. She was going to be lectured on war crimes by a fucking batarian, who was even now slinking through the trees of her childhood trying to kill her. Her grip on her pistol tightened and she moved to follow him as he continued to move northerly through the trees.

"My brother was one of the ones who lived to retreat. They dug themselves in on a little moon in the Dregan system. Torfan, it was called." She could hear the brittle anger in his voice, the snarl as he continued to break through the underbrush, his four eyes searching the empty expanse as her two trained on the back of his head. Her hand itched with her want to put a bullet there, in the soft flesh at the base of his skull. She held back, grinding her teeth as he pressed on. "Where you slaughtered him."

She sighed, rubbing at her eyes. She had long ago come to accept that what she had done at Torfan was wrong, that she had a price to pay for the bodies she had left there. Being lectured on it now was so unnecessary, there was nothing anyone could blame her for that she did not already have covered herself.

"Which was fine. Batarians don't surrender to humans, even if those humans are better, faster and stronger than they are. It simply isn't done. He wouldn't have been a real warrior if you hadn't killed him." He spat, she could hear it splattering his rage among leaves. "That's what pisses me off so much, you see. If you're going to be a limp-dicked coward who can't kill with a modicum of respect, you could have left me my brother. But no, you took him and then you wouldn't afford me a simple warrior's dignity when I asked you for it. That's why I'm going to take my time with you Shepard. That's why I'm really going to _enjoy _choking the life out of you. More so than usual, I mean."

She could see this was not going anywhere. They were at an impasse, both of them too well aware of what was at stake to jab out and make a stand. Or at least, he was. As much as he accused her of being a coward, she knew he would never break formation, never plunge out into the forest alone and meet her face to face.

The first bullet took the man standing on his right out, punching through his temple and out his eye in a wash of flying grey matter. Shouts of alarm from his surviving guard as he spun, his eyes snapping automatically to her position as though he could smell her. Maybe he could. Were batarians supposed to have better senses than humans? She could not remember, as she swung around to the other side of the tree and planted two bullets in his other companion. The man went down, thrashing in the bushes before she could tell whether she had killed him.

The blast of his gun coincided with a seizure in her arm as a cold dart sunk into the flesh just under her shoulder, tossing her back against a nearby tree. Her other hand slapped against the impact point, feeling ragged flesh, sudden wetness blooming against the fabric as her gun dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers. The cold was being replaced by heat now, a sharp agony spreading as the scent of hot copper hit her. She looked up, as he attacker closed in on her, hands latching themselves around her throat.

He lifted her up, boots swinging as she tried to kick him, and pinned her body against the tree. Her hands shot to his, the blood on her fingers making her fingers slip ineffectually against his rock hard grip. She sucked a tiny gasp of air in, and then his grip tightened and she was suffocating. She tried to hit him, her wounded arm doing little more than brush ineffectually against his hands.

"Eclipse wanted you alive, Shepard." He snarled. "They think you're valuable. But they'll just fuck me out of any cut of that money anyway, so I like this option better. I'm going to savour watching the light go out of your eyes."

This was too familiar, the pressure in her chest, the sudden strain of her tendons as her lungs fought to swell. She grabbed one of his wrists as he started to laugh at her, her eyes rolling into the back of her head and raised her damaged arm above her head.

Bearing down on his elbow with hers sent agony tearing through her open wound and the torn ligaments underneath, but she carried through it and his grip finally tore away. She gulped air as she fell sideways, slamming her damaged shoulder against the ground. The world spun and seized as she sagged and he kicked her in the stomach, forcing the air from her lungs. He had abandoned his gun sometime after shooting her, intent on finishing this with his hands and bent over her, reaching out.

She brought her knee up into his gut and he grunted, pitching forward so she could punch him in the face. As he veered to the side, swearing violently she fought her way to her feet, looking for her gun. He had already recovered by the time she spotted it, half-hidden in the underbrush a few feet away. He hit her with the back of his hand, her nose exploding in a way that was almost familiar. Her mouth filled with blood and she screamed and spat it at him. He roared in response and dived at her, knocking her defending hand aside and delivering an uppercut that made her jaws snap shut and her head spin. A moment later he had his hands around her throat again and threw her violently to the ground.

"I'll give you credit, Shepard. You're one tough bitch." He laughed, wiping blood from his cut lip off on the back of his hand as he kicked her deliberately in her open bullet wound. She moaned and curled up, holding her face and arm in one hand each. She was having trouble concentrating, her thoughts vibrating between her ears as she struggled to stand. That made him laugh even harder and he flipped her on to her back and leaned over her, his breath tainted with acidic batarian blood and half-digested food. It made her stomach pitch violently and she gagged. "But it's time to give it up. I'm going to kill you, I'm going to kill the famous Commander Shepard, the Butcher of Torfan, the Saviour of the Citadel, the White fucking Knight of the Terminus Systems. Me." He laughed shortly. "Life is full of surprises."

He was strangling her again, his hands like a ring of iron around her throat and she had no strength to resist this time. He filled her vision, blocking out the trees above, his stink chasing away the smell of earth and grass, his heavy breathing and her desperate choking shattering the stillness of the undergrowth. Her world was full of him, his savage glee smudging into a swirl of menacing colours as the world began to grow numb, her lungs burning now and awareness slipping away. There were no needles of stims and medigel to draw it out, no horrific terror as she exploded on the inside out. This was like going to sleep. Like resting.

A gun shot went off, and then suddenly there was air again, flooding her grateful body with such force that tears filled her eyes and poured down her face. She gulped, gasped as she tried to sit up and the world spun so powerfully that she collapsed backwards again, gagging.

"Shepard?" Dusty blue eyes filled her vision and suddenly there was a strong arm on her shoulder, helping her sit. She opened her mouth to speak, and instead puked all over her saviour and herself. Moaning, she slumped over and put her head in her hands. Even with the hands gone the world seemed flat and out of focus for the first time in months. She had finally grown so used to seeing everything with perfect clarity that the absence of it was now painful.

"Siha?" She looked up again, black eyes now as Garrus tried to wipe her sick off his armour. She opened her mouth and made a wet hacking sound. Her hand shot to her throat and found it already swollen under her fingers, no doubt turning purple. Thane touched it to, his face dark as his cool fingers probed the damaged flesh. "Are you going to be alright?"

She nodded. She was Shepard. She was always alright, no matter what happened. That much was clear among the sluggish mush of her thoughts. He did not look convinced and rather than trying to help her stand merely picked her up off the ground, cradling her against his chest with ease. She thought about fighting him, but her arm hurt so bad, and the world was still spinning in and out of focus and she was so damn tired that nothing really seemed to matter.

"She has a concussion." She heard Thane say, and then Garrus said something back and then they were moving, trees and bushes flashing by in a wild mashing of colour and shape.

"Stay awake, Siha," She heard Thane say, jostling her urgently. She perked up, slinging one arm over his shoulders and trying to stay alert. "Talk to me. Tell me something interesting."

He wanted her to form thoughts right now? She shook her head but he continued to bounce her uncomfortably in his arms, keeping her from putting her head down and she struggled to find something to appease him.

"When we first came down here, I wondered how of all the places on Mindoir, we just happened to wind up here." She said finally. Thane glanced at her and she winced, shielding her eyes as they left the cover of the trees and emerged into the meadows. "It doesn't really make sense, not really. Unless some things really are inevitable. Unless I was meant to be here, to undergo all of this, to struggle and suffer."

"No one is meant to suffer." Thane replied. She had never asked him much about his religion, such discussions seeming too riddled with opportunities for conflict or miscommunication, but the way he spoke now made it sound like a deeply held belief. "Suffering is created by people."

"Of course it is. I created the suffering I underwent here." She replied. "By doing what I did on Torfan."

"Shepard…" Garrus sounded concerned but she just shook her head, quieting him with a look from her bleary yet serious eyes.

"It's okay Garrus, it's better than okay. This is my karma at play, a natural pattern of life completing itself through events on so many different levels of importance it's difficult to really understand. All of my life has conspired to bring me to this point, as it always has." She got the sense that she was rambling, but no one seemed to mind. Even as she paused Thane readjusted her in his arms, his jarring steps making her shoulder throb painfully. Her thoughts fluttered from subject to subject so rapidly in this state that she soon forgot what she had said, and was talking about other things, fragmented half-thoughts that spilled out before they were even finished forming. By the time they got her to the ship she was rambling nonsensically about how there were no fish in the Presidium lake.

Her companions remembered though. Such a strange thing to come from their Commander, who had spent most of her life insisting that she was not special, that there was no great path laid out for her. It must have been the concussion, of course, but the seriousness of her lacquered eyes haunted them during the entire long shuttle ride back during which she described the ceiling to them in great detail. Whatever was happening to Shepard, whatever haunted her down there on that planet, it worried them all.d


	16. 16

A/N: Taking a reviewers advice and trying a slightly less Shepard-centric narrative for this chapter. Not sure if I'll stick with it, let me know what you think.

"Is she going to be alright?" Garrus' voice was gruff, almost brittle, as the doctor exited the medical bay looking absolutely exhausted. It had been almost impossible to keep Shepard conscious the entire shuttle ride back to the Normandy, her words becoming steadily less and less lucid as she jerked in and out of awareness. Getting her to the med bay had been a harrowing experience, full of swearing about slow elevators and even slapping the commanders cheeks to keep her from nodding off while cradled in Thane's arms.

"She'll be fine. I had to give her a blood thinner and cranial anticoagulant to take the swelling down, but she'll be fine. She's obviously had concussions before." The doctor rubbed at her eyes and put a hand on her hip. "God, it was almost a relief when her voice finally broke entirely. She was talking about frogs having sex while I was sticking a needle in her temple. Then she started crying because her belly button was so cute and fell asleep half way through a garbled serenade."

Garrus laughed, a dull sound without any joy and relaxed a little bit. One hand rubbed fiercely at the base of his neck and he grimaced visibly. In the minutes when they had not been sure if there was permanent damage the three of them, Tali, Thane and Garrus had done nothing but sit silently in the mess hall or pace past the covered windows lost in dark thoughts. The thought of losing Shepard, really losing her, was horrifying. No one on board knew what would happen if they did.

"I'm going to change." He said finally, looking down at his armour that was still smeared with vomit and grass. "And take a shower. Let me know if her condition changes."

"Of course." Doctor Chakwas nodded, as though it were natural that she would refer to him in Shepard's absence. Miranda had been second in command when the ship was Cerberus, and Shepard had technically never demoted her, but it was clear who was really in charge until the commander was back on her feet. Garrus had obviously not fully realized it until that moment and his face grew suddenly dark, crowded with emotions that no one there really knew how to read. When he finally turned and walked away, toward the forward battery, they all watched him go.

"He'll do fine." The doctor said, sounding only a little nervous.

"Of course he will." Tali replied, her voice much more confident. After a moment, she went after him, ignoring the cheeky looks the two engineers were giving her from the mess table. With the two of them gone, there was only Thane and the doctor left, and she stepped aside before he even had to ask. Nodding his thanks he passed her and entered the closely furnished room.

Only one bed was occupied, the figure curled under the blankets almost completely motionless. Only the slight rise and fall of her chest revealed that she was alive at all. As he came up beside her he knew that she was sleeping, her face so smooth he could not help but run his fingers lightly over her forehead, down her cheeks. Where stress normally gouged deep creases and frown lines there was now nothing to suggest she was a day older than twenty, untouched by the ravages of life only when she was entirely gone from the world. He ran his fingers through her strange, silky hair and sighed, pulling a chair up beside her. If he was going to meditate, he might as well do it here, with her. Waking up alone from an injury was always jarring, confusing, and painful.

He did not meditate though, not as he had intended at least. Her breathing whistled and hitched until he pulled the blankets down a little bit to look at her throat. The ring of heavy purple bruises made him wish that it had been his bullet that pounded through that batarians chest, sinking him into the tall grass where he had still been sputtering and gasping even as they bent over their commander. When Tali had put the final, merciful, bullet in him, Thane had barely noticed. All his attention had been on her, on making sure that she was alright, on what he would do to everyone responsible if she was not. Even now, a cold chill slid down his spine as he thought of how close they had been. A few more minutes, a few more seconds, and they might well have been zipping her up in a body bag to bring her back here.

He touched her bruises, very lightly, with one hand, then traced the pale, golden line of her neck. He was shocked, as he always was at some level, by the contrast between them. His scales looked almost metallic against her, the sheen of them so different from the soft valleys of light and shadow of her soft human skin. The sensitive pads of his fingers could feel the burning heat of her, she always felt so hot to him without scales to diffuse her inner furnace. It was something that attracted him far more powerfully than her appearance, and he found his hand lingering on her neck, soaking in the warmth of her skin as he watched her sleep. When they had first met he had been beyond thoughts of beauty or ugliness for years; while his body had needs, his mind was dead to the idea that someone could be attractive. Her eyes had brought him out of that, they had been the first thing in years that had sparked any reaction in him. The ring of orange around black, the glow of what he now understood to be refracting lenses and microscopic implanted lights he had thought to be pure fire, a popular physical manifestation of the spirit of Arashu in drell lore. It was those eternally eclipsing eyes, and the opportunity that she had offered him, that had woken him from his battle sleep.

"Do you make a habit of feeling up head-trauma patients?" The scratchy, whispery voice, drew him out of memory and he looked up to find those lovely eyes half open, still slightly dopey and glowing in the dim light. She yawned and moved to sit up before hissing and clutching at the shoulder that had been torn apart by the bullet with one hand. Although the flesh and muscle had been patched with medigel, the phantom pains remained and would for a couple days. The body had trouble keeping pace with technology sometimes.

"Only the ones as attractive as you." He said softly, dropping back into the seat he had pulled up as she made a face he could not read. She rolled onto her side and studied him, looking for emotion in his stoic face, his unmoving lips and finally settling on his troubled eyes. "How are you feeling?"

"Like I got hit by a car." She replied, flipping one hand casually. "And then choked out by it. About what you would expect I guess." She tried to laugh, but instead made a wet hacking sound that quickly dissolved into a cough that wrenched her entire body. Gritting her teeth, she blinked tears out of her eyes and gave him a smile that was mostly a grimace.

He said nothing for a long moment, and then shook his head. "That was not exactly what I was asking."

"I know goddamnit." She snapped back, her voice grinding harshly. "Sorry. I know you're just worried, that everyone is just worried. But fuck, I don't know. It turns out that I don't know much of anything when it comes right down to it. At least not much more that how to point a gun at things and pull the trigger." She made a self-deprecating face. "I was stupid, and I won't let it happen again. That's how I feel. Stupid, and wiser."

"You almost died." Thane replied bluntly. "And that's all it was? A life lesson?"

"I actually died." Shepard shot back, just as bluntly. "And it was a fuck of a lot worse that time. What happened down there on Mindoir? That was gentle compared to the first one. Like the difference between a tender kiss and a kick in the teeth." She hacked again and looked around for something to wet her throat. Thane found a glass of water left for that very purpose, no doubt, and handed it to her. She sipped it in the silence that followed, wincing every time she swallowed.

"I am worried. I'm worried that we're losing you." Thane said finally. "That I'm losing you. I'm worried about how scared that makes me."

She slumped back against the pillows, staring up at the ceiling with its dimly lit tile lights and chewed her lip, as was her way when she was struggling to find something to say. It was not an expression he saw very often, he had to search his many perfect memories of her to call an exact instance to mind. "You aren't losing me." She said finally. "I'm right here, where I always will be, at the helm of the Normandy steering her toward great things. But things have changed. Things always change, and we change with them."

"All your changes lately seem to end with scars and stress lines." Thane argued. Her gaze flicked from the ceiling to him as she fought her annoyance, the instinctual hatred she had for talking about her emotions. If he saw how uncomfortable she was, he did not acknowledge it. "You're distracted. Your thoughts wander. I fear you are becoming detached from your body."

"I'm not-" She choked back the anger in her voice, swallowed it and took a deep breath. "I… look. What do you want me to say? Yes, I'm incredibly fucking stressed out. Fighting the Reapers with guns and cannons and daring base assaults is one thing. If I slip up I get a bullet hole, or some burns or something, and I find a way through. Because I'm a soldier, it's what I'm meant to do. But this Terminus stuff… if I slip up here I could get an entire colony murdered by pirates as an example. Or I could start a civil war, or fuck even a war between the Alliance and the Terminus. And I'm not a politician. If I set something off I can't fix it with some strategic retreat and a grenade. Everything I do or say has the potential to change countless lives. And at the end of the day the Reapers are still coming, the ultimate and thus far unstoppable annihilation of the galaxy. So how am I supposed to feel? How am I supposed to handle this pressure? Do you have an answer for me? Because I'm still trying to figure it out."

He was quiet for a long moment and then he shook his head. "I don't have an answer for you." He admitted finally, disappointment infusing his voice. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be! Don't be fucking sorry all the time." She did not sound angry, at least not at him specifically. She fought her way to a sitting position and he half rose from his chair to help her before she waved him off, gritting her teeth against the pain in her shoulder. "At least not because you don't have all the answers. If anyone else did, I wouldn't be asking you, putting the weight of my responsibilities on your shoulders. That's why I don't like talking about it, about how I feel, because every time I do it just makes people uncomfortable and then they eventually start giving me that PITY look. I hate it. And I hate it when people apologize to me all the time for things they have no control over. So stop it."

"I'm upsetting you." Thane said softly, standing. "I should go."

"No, fuck, please don't." She said, putting her head in her hand. Her shoulders deflated and for a moment there was no Commander Jane Shepard in the med lab, just a tired woman who might look young, with her Cerberus facelift and strong, capable body, but was in truth just another aging soldier. In the close stillness of the air one could almost sense the unbelievable pressure bearing down on her from all sides. "I don't… I don't want to be alone. Sometimes I need to be, but I… I never want to send you away."

He seemed to hesitate for a moment and Shepard slumped back against her pillows, closing her eyes. She was so tired all of a sudden, always so tired, always longing for peaceful rest in a world where that did not exist anymore. When she was awake, all the horrors of the world hung on her shoulders, scrabbling and scratching for purchase while she battled her inner demons with one hand and the outer demons with her other. When she slept, ghosts of the past assailed her or the heavy chemical compounds obliterated all consciousness and she woke heavy-eyed and rested only in the physical sense. The only time she ever felt really at peace, the only escape she had, the only thing that was just for her and not tainted by the constant demands of everything and everyone else in the universe was her relationship with him.

And here she was, concussed and rambling, getting angry, messing everything up. Like she always did.

"This time, it is I that needs to be alone." He said finally, his voice strangely quiet, distant and emotionless. "I need to think."

She nodded without looking at him. "As you wish."

He hesitated again, she could feel it in the air even with her eyes closed, and then he was gone and she was alone. She took two sleeping pills and rolled onto her side. Sleep came, as it always did, not to melt away her exhaustion or ease her aching body, but as a distraction from everything she was not ready to face. When Chakwas shook her awake, forcing food into her hands and lecturing her on over-sleeping now, she ate without argument, without any words at all really.

They pegged it to her concussion, when she mentioned it to Garrus later, but neither of them could remember when an injury had ever been enough to shut Shepard up. When the doctor left her terminal and went to check on her patient again, she found that she was asleep once more. After a moment, she took the pills from her bedside table and locked them in the medicine cabinet, reasoning that it was probably for the best. When her patient awoke, hours later, and immediately reached for them again, she knew that she was right.

"I think you've slept enough, don't you?" She asked, coming over to her bedside and taking the chair that Thane had pulled up hours ago. Shepard made an absolutely disgusted face, and slumped back against the pillows with her arms spread to either side.

"What else am I supposed to do?" She asked miserably. "Count ceiling tiles?" At least her voice sounded better, if still slightly rough, and she raised one hand to the necklace of mottled bruising under her jaw bone. It was still tender, and she winced slightly as she probed the purpled flesh.

"I took the liberty of collecting some personal items from your quarters for you." Chakwas replied, motioning to the pile of data pads and the single, rolled piece of paper tied with its blue ribbon. Shepard picked the Bhagavad up, trailing her fingers over the fraying edges and managed to smile. "But first, we need to run some tests. Make sure everything is working properly up there."

Shepard rolled her eyes, but complied without argument. Her complacency with the entire process was so complete and so silent that it was almost depressing, and when the doctor had finally finished the reflex tests and put away her instruments Shepard was still just sitting on the edge of the bed staring down at her toes with a blank, distant look on her face. When the door swished open and Garrus entered the room, clean and no longer smelling quite so viciously of stomach acid and half-digested food, it was a relief to see her smile.

"Garrus, don't tell me you messed up already. I had such high hopes for you." She joked. The tall turian hesitated, his mandibles flaring slightly as he looked at her. Doctor Chakwas was no turian expert, but she could understand the situation well enough, and excused herself silently, sliding out into the mess hall. Shepard quirked an eyebrow at him as he silently advanced on the bed and sat down, readjusting himself in the uncomfortably tiny seat designed for humans.

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Are you- I'm not- I…" His voice trailed off and he frowned, his mandibles flaring wider as his hands balled into fists on his knees. "I'm not sure I'm ready for this, Shepard. Leading the second squad in our ground assaults is one thing, but everyone seems to think I'm an executive officer all of a sudden. Even you."

"Garrus, you've been an executive officer since the day I cut the cord with the Illusive Man. You've always had all the privileged access codes, and I formalized it in the ships VI protocols and everything. I even told EDI that you were ranking officer if I was ever incapacitated for any reason. The only reason you never had a real rank is because we were never really a military ship and 'first mate' makes us sound like pirates." She cocked an eyebrow at him. "You didn't really think I'd leave Miranda in charge did you? She's great at keeping the ship running on a day to day basis, but can you imagine her as commanding officer of the Normandy?" She shook her head. "No, it was always you."

"I can't imagine ME as commanding officer of the Normandy." Garrus insisted. "I don't know what you all think you see in me but-"

"No, you can't refuse." Shepard replied bluntly. "I need you to do this. I need to know that if something happens to me, I've left someone who has a hope of stopping the Reapers in charge, someone I can trust to do the right thing and succeed at the same time."

Garrus blinked at her and then stood up, beginning to pace around her bed. "You can't force me to take this responsibility Shepard. And besides, why do you have so much faith in me? I let my whole team die on Omega, what's to say it won't happen again here?"

"I can force you, and I will." She replied. "I know you Garrus, better than you know yourself. You failed on Omega, and it cost lives. I won't deny that. But that doesn't mean you can't still amount to something, that you can't do great things. You know who else failed? I did. I failed on Torfan, I let my emotions get in the way of my better judgement. In my case, I only got two people killed. But two bodies following you around still makes it pretty hard to sleep at night."

She looked down at her feet again, the delicate bones standing out under the golden skin. "I know what it's like to lose all faith in yourself, to feel like you can never shoulder that responsibility again. But we all do what we have to. I have to fight this war, I have to lead people into hellish situations where they could all be horribly killed or maimed. And you have to do it with me, because without you…" Her voice trailed off and she did not finish, but she did not really have to.

Sighing heavily, Garrus sank onto the bed beside her, forsaking the chair. After a moment she curled her legs up against her chest and put her head on his shoulder. "I'm sorry." She said. "But I can't do it all alone, not anymore. I need you."

"I know." He sounded absolutely exhausted and she sighed unhappily. Being the bearer of such terrible pressure and responsibility was not something she had wanted to be. It was her job to remove problems, to help people have the normal lives they would otherwise be denied. That was her purpose.

"You'll do fine. Better than fine." She assured him. "I believe in you."

He looked over at her, and put an arm across her shoulders after a moment. She could feel him inhale, draw himself up and set his shoulders. All it took was a little encouragement, and a little time to adjust to the new circumstances, and he would be fine. He was a natural leader, just like her. The responsibilities that came with realizing it would eventually make him stronger, focus his mind and empower him. She hoped so at least, there was no way to really be certain how command would affect people once they accepted it.

"So does this mean I get a promotion?" He asked. "And a raise maybe?"

"Sure, I'll raise your pay from nothing to LOTS of nothing." She replied. "And we can start calling you Lieutenant Vakarian if you like."

He rolled his dark eyes and shook his head no. "I'd prefer something flashier."

"Grand vizier?"

"I'll think about it." He grinned. She relaxed slightly, seeing the tension easing already. Garrus adapted fast, like most good soldiers did. He stood as the doctor re-entered the room, snatching up a data pad from the desk. She looked up at them and a warm smile of relief broke across her face. "So how long is observation for human head-wounds anyway. I know on turian ships it's twelve hours."

Doctor Chakwas laughed quietly. "Nice try, Vakarian. But humans aren't turians. Each concussion significantly raises the potency and chance of long-standing side effects, and the commander has had her skull knocked around more times then I care to recount. Mandatory observation period is thirty hours." She glared at the two of them as they made surprisingly identical faces of disgust and horror. "Thirty hours in bed, and a further thirty barred from active duty."

"That's almost three days!" Shepard exclaimed. "I feel fine! I could take on Eclipse right now if I had to." She should have known better than to argue, but she could not help it. The thought of spending thirty hours staring at the ceiling, without sleeping pills now, was a prospect too horrific to imagine. She would probably go completely insane around fourteen. The expression on the doctors face said more than words ever could and she turned away, taking a seat at her work station without bothering. Shepard sighed, a gust of warm air that blew her bangs out of her eyes.

"Great." She sighed theatrically. "I'm on lockdown."

"Sorry." Garrus sighed. "But I've got to go. Poker in engineering."

Shepard made a mournful face, but said nothing, and he hesitantly inched his way out. She rolled onto her side, staring at the wall as she wondered how she could possibly fill so many empty hours. As always, when faced with recovery time, she was reminded of how painfully empty her life was. Maybe she should pick up a hobby. Something calming that did not require a firing range or a sparring ring. That would probably do her good, though she was not sure exactly what kind of hobby one picked up in the middle of space at thirty-two. She was a bit old for paint-by-numbers.

Just as she was considering attempting to pull a Thane and sneak out through the vents when the doctors back was turned the door opened again, and four determined people marched into the med lab. Well, Tali and Garrus looked determined, the engineers really just did their best to hide behind them when the doctor stood, meeting them with stony blue eyes.

"I told you, thirty hours is mandatory! It's the least amount of time I can allow." She growled, sounding stressed to her limit. Soldiers were undoubtedly the worst kind of patient, head-strong, overly independent and mostly convinced of their own physical superiority. Especially Shepard. Garrus raised one hand in a peaceful gesture.

"I know. But we can just play here right?" The engineers held up the card table hopefully and she looked between the four of them with narrowed eyes.

"Alright. But you can't drink." She turned on Shepard. "Or smoke."

"Doctor! I'm surprised at how little faith you have in me. I don't do those kind of things." She raised both hands defensively and attempted to look innocent.

"I know what you're like Shepard. In fact, I better just sit in to keep an eye on you." Her face broke into a smile for the first time and she looked between the five of them as though daring them to call her out on it. None of them bothered, they just began pushing beds and tables out of the way to clear a space.

"You'll probably win all my money." Shepard said, trying to sound mournful as she worked her way out of bed, still wincing at the stabbing pains in her smooth, unblemished shoulder. "I'm just awful at Skyllian Five."

"If you believe that, I've got a statue on the Citadel I'd like to sell you." Daniels commented, as she began unfolding the card table. She rolled her eyes as Shepard shrugged helplessly.

"You just can't bluff, Daniels." She teased, kicking her feet into her boots and not bothering to fasten them as she tramped over to the hastily erected station.

"It doesn't matter. I've been practising' my poker face all week. You're goin' down, Shepard." Donnely took the seat directly across from her, his bright eyes twinkling at her as she settled down and schooled her features instantly into a blank slate. His cocky grin wavered only a little bit, and she twitched one eyebrow. After a moment he broke eye contact and she smiled inwardly.

"We'll see." She said, no hint of her amusement showing itself on her lips. She won enough by the end of the night to promise everyone dinner next time they had a moment for shore leave. When everyone filed out, Donnely looking dejected yet still determined to best her some day, she settled back into the pillows resigned to a long night of staring out through the windows into the mess hall. Closing her eyes, she wondered what Thane was thinking about over in life support, if she should go see him or not.

She fell asleep thinking about it, and did not dream.


	17. 17

Had anyone ever asked Jane Shepard to explain herself to them, to give them a succinct summary of who she was, the first word she probably would have used was boring. She was surrounded, constantly, by amazing and terrifying things but she herself was a thoughtful introvert. She had no great talent or passion beyond combat, not a topic of polite conversation in most circles, and as a result found little to talk about with people who existed outside her world of guns, ships and battle tactics. Shore leave tend to find her cloistered with her inner thoughts or catching up on work rather than haunting clubs or taking in the local atmosphere. She was uncomfortable with other people, that was the gist of it. She had never really gotten around to learning how to be human.

Was that why it was so difficult to explain what it was that dragged her thoughts down, to the forests of Mindoir so heavily? Everything seemed so simple and clear in her own mind. There were ancient traditions that needed tending to and, she had explained to the baffled and slightly angry Garrus, she had already done most of the work four days ago. She just needed a day or so, to make things right, to put everything the way it needed to be before she could leave. She had not budged, even when he stalked off in mute disgust with her silent, stubborn stares.

No one really understood, not even those who tried their hardest. Even Tali, who had never really doubted her in anything, had come up to her quarters as she was getting ready to tell her what a terrible idea it was to go back to Mindoir alone. She had agreed, whole-heartedly, that it was not the wisest course of action but in the end had insisted she do it anyway. Doctor Chakwas and Miranda had teamed up to try and stop her when she retrieved the supplies Rupert had put together for her in the mess hall. She had been similarly stubborn and impossible to derail. She lived her entire life in service to the galaxy and its greater need. Now, for two days maximum, she was going to be selfish and stubborn and do what she did not want to do, but needed to do. She was not going to let anyone stand in her way.

So when Garrus appeared, in full armour, as she threw the last of her bundles into the back of the shuttle she put her hands on her hips and prepared herself for a fight. She was not wearing her usual heavy N7 armour, instead she had donned a Survival Suit, reinforced carbonized fibres and padding providing protection without costing any flexibility or range of movement. She stood at the top of the ramp as he stopped at the bottom and stared down at him, her dark eyes with their halo of orange light unflinching. He stared right back, not saying anything, the metallic side of his face glinting in the dull lights. A moment of silence passed between them as she fought with her fierce, usually unyielding need to be independent. Finally, she nodded once.

"Okay. But whatever happens, whatever is said, it stays between us. Entirely. Forever." She said.

"Of course, Shepard." He climbed the ramp to stand beside her. "On my honour."

She slapped him once on the shoulder and managed to smile at him through the knot of emotion twisting in her stomach. She should be proud, happy to be standing with someone at this moment, to have moved beyond her insane need to be isolated, to have someone she trusted as much as Garrus. But she was just nervous, dreading the task she was too damn stubborn to abandon. He took a seat and she scanned the cargo bay, making sure she had not forgotten anything. Her shotgun was laying on the seat, her M-6 was holstered at her side, all the bundles of food and supplies were neatly stacked and accounted for, yet still she paused, looking for that thing she was sure she had forgotten.

"I thought he'd come to, Shepard." Garrus said from his seat. She did not turn around, but knew that he had read her far more efficiently than she could even read herself. That was what she was waiting for, what kept bothering her. It had been almost three days since anyone had spoken to Thane, since anyone had seen him. She had struggled and struggled with her want to go and see him, but in the end her respect for his wishes ran deeper. The last time they had spoken she had still been rocked by her head injury, and her memories of their conversation were foggy at best. But she got the distinct impression that he did not want to see her, and his silent absence solidified that fear entirely.

Finally, she sighed and sat down across from her friend. As the shuttle pulled out she stared through the window, almost hoping that he would appear around the corner at the last minute. When he did not, she was not entirely sure how to feel.

"I gotta admit, Shepard. It seems like a weird choice on your part." Garrus admitted as she crossed her arms and drew her bottom lip between her teeth, worrying it lightly as she thought. Her eyes flickered to him, and then down to the floor. She crossed her legs and took a deep breath, considering all her possible responses.

"Because he's an assassin?" She asked, finally.

"Because he's a freelance assassin, yeah. Not your typical gun for hire, I have eyes and can see that much, but still just another guy putting bullets in people for credits." He did not sound angry, like everyone else on the ship he had come to accept the members of the crew despite any personal problems he might have with them. Even Miranda and Jack had put their simmering enmity aside after the Collector Base, recognizing the importance of what they were doing. He certainly sounded like he disapproved but there was also something darker to his tone. Almost protective. "That's not your style."

"Thane wouldn't kill just anyone for credits. He's a good man." Shepard argued. "He has more morals then a lot of sworn soldiers I've met, and while that doesn't excuse the mistakes he's made at least he's trying to do better. To atone. That takes more courage and honesty than most people have."

"Is that why you're sleeping with him? Because you respect him?" Garrus asked, giving her a disbelieving look.

"You make it sound so tawdry. 'Sleeping with him'. Are you 'sleeping with' Tali?" She asked. He shook his head fiercely, dark blue eyes sparking with sudden emotion. She cocked her head to the side. It had seemed to her that they had just started this whole thing, but the look in the turian's eyes made her think that perhaps she was not as observant as she first thought. That, or she had been too wrapped up in her own drama to notice the obvious signs. "I didn't think so. Thane and I… we have a connection. I don't know how to explain in better than that. He understands me. He accepts me, and he makes me feel..."

She uncrossed her arms and twisted her hands in her lap as she looked for the words. It had been a long time since she had talked about something as mundane as dating with anyone. If dating was really the word, which she supposed it was not. She had 'dated' in Command School, dresses and dinner, drinking and fucking, none of it had ever been as immediately intimate as what she had with Thane. Dating was fun, and sometimes it led to something deeper and became something else. They had skipped right to that something else, it seemed, and it was intimidating to try and put words on it when it was so new but so meaningful.

"I guess he just makes me feel normal. I don't have to be Commander Shepard when I'm with him and somehow, that makes it easier when I do." She laughed faintly and shook her head at her own sappiness. "I sound like I'm eighteen all over again."

"It'll do that to you." Garrus agreed, leaning back. Apparently, something she had said had satisfied him and he no longer looked so concerned.

"What will?" She asked.

He gave her a puzzled look. "You do love him don't you?"

"I-" She stopped herself before the immediate denial could fly off her lips and sighed, cupping her forehead in her hand and thinking hard. "I don't know. Maybe. It feels so soon to say something like that. We've only been doing this for like a month, we've only had sex once. Isn't there supposed to be some sort of build up to the l-word?"

He shrugged. "I guess so. But I'm no expert."

She had no response, but luckily he did not need one. They were burning into the atmosphere now, the carpet of green forest unrolling faster and faster beneath them. Soon she could see the whorls of the terraces against the mountains, and the small metallic lines of the settlement nearby. When they touched down, she relished the wash of warm, unrecycled air and threw her head back, squinting at the sun to determine how many hours of daylight they had left. Enough.

"So did you come to make yourself useful or just to play body guard?" She asked, turning around as he began to toss the supplies from the shuttle onto the ground. He paused, a tarp-wrapped bundle in each hand and stared down at her, his mandibles twitching.

"Whatever you need me to do, Shepard. I came for you." He said, before tramping down the steel ramp. She smiled at him.

"Good. You can do the heavy lifting while I go flower picking." He laughed, a deep sound in the bellows of his chest and stopped when he realized she was not joking. She flashed him a smile full of teeth and clapped him on the shoulder. "Believe me, the flowers are important."

"Important for what?" He asked, sounding suspicious. She looked down the little street, to the pile of wood she had already gathered. It was not nearly enough, despite its considerable size.

"Dressing the pyre. It's traditional for us to burn our dead." She told him, turning back and giving the ditch that served as a mass grave a meaningful look. "I can't just leave them like that, Garrus. I know they're just bones, I know that burning them won't do any good and it's just a waste of time but I-"

He put his hand on her shoulder. "You don't need to explain it to me Shepard. I understand." He said. He eyed the pile she had collected and squared his shoulders slightly. "We're going to need a lot more wood."

She nodded, relieved that she had not been forced to carry through on that conversation. She was not sure where that would have led. Nowhere she wanted to go, she suspected. Being on Mindoir was a curious mix of intense emotions and overwhelming numbness. There were certain thing she simply could not afford to feel right now. She would deal with them when she had done her duty, when the deed was done. Now, she needed to focus.

The garlands she had made were wilted beyond salvaging, but she gathered armfuls of fresh flowers and brought them down to the small house they had decided to use as shelter for the next while. By the time she had brought enough Garrus had, by virtue of his considerable strength and ability to move swiftly over steep terrain, gathered more wood than she had imagined possible. He started constructing the crude pyre, a single, long stack of wood where the bodies would have to be stacked on top of each other with kindling in between. Tradition made certain demands on her, but the needs of the many could not be pushed aside. She had to do this quick and efficient. It would have to be enough. As Garrus worked, she sat on the intact portion of a collapsing porch and made garlands, her mind wandering listlessly as she worked.

By the time dusk started colouring the sky the pyre was done, and draped with the flower garlands. Tomorrow would be the hardest part. She dreaded climbing down into that ravine, pulling the skeletons from the grip of the soil, arranging their shrivelled limbs into the postures of death. But she had come this far, and there was no backing out now. She called Garrus inside and they crouched in the main room, a fire lit on the stone hearth. Garrus dug for the dextro rations he had brought, but Shepard ignored the packs of rations that Rupert had put together for her, drinking water and taking a seat against one wall instead.

"Didn't doctor Chakwas make you swear you'd eat well while we were down here?" He asked, as he bit off a chunk of some aromatic white pastry. She nodded, crossing her legs and leaning back against the stone wall.

"She did. But fasting is part of the process, it focuses the mind and purifies the body. I can't consume anything but water until I light the pyre." She replied, closing her eyes and relaxing her shoulders away from her ears. She rotated her hips slightly, getting her spine properly aligned by force of habit more than anything else. "I told her I would eat so she wouldn't worry."

He murmured his understanding and than said nothing while he dedicated himself to eating. She let her mind wander, and then steadily go blank. The crackling of the fire, the thrum of her companions breathing, the stirring of Mindoir's nocturnal creatures all formed a white noise, cancelling each other out as she began to meditate, almost unconsciously at first and then with dedication. She had forgotten how quiet the world could be, how quiet her own brain could be, and how much of a relief it was to fill herself with that respite. When Garrus cleared his throat discreetly and her eyes fluttered open she felt as though she had woken from a peaceful sleep, even though it could not have been longer than fifteen minutes. It was strange how easily it came back to her here, when it had always seemed impossible anywhere else.

"I looked up karma, you know. After doctor Chakwas said you were okay, and I'd taken a shower." He said as she fixed her eyes on him. She cocked an eyebrow at him in mute question and he laughed lightly. "I guess I should have figured you wouldn't remember. When we were trying to keep you awake during our run back to the shuttle you said that you had come to Mindoir because it was your karma."

She tried to laugh it off, uncrossing her legs and folding them against her chest, but she could see he was not buying it. After a moment, she sighed. "So you looked it up. What did you think?"

"I found it strange. Most turians don't believe in reincarnation." He replied, using the cautious voice most people used when they spoke about religion. It was a sensitive topic, even among the best of friends.

"Neither do most humans. Karma isn't just about reincarnation though, it has a broader everyday definition. The most miniscule good and bad decisions you make can have enormous consequences through happenings so complex and inter-connected it cannot be fathomed. Or so the logic goes." She shrugged.

"So you actually believe it? That you were meant to be here?" He asked, looking around the dark, decaying room. Tacks in the wall held the last tattered strips of what had once been painted murals and drawings. The rusted wash buckets and dust piles were the only furniture here, the table and any piece of unrotted wood had been salvaged to build the pyre. "You always said you weren't religious."

"I'm not." Shepard insisted. "I can't be. Look, there are a hundred thousand million planets in this galaxy at least, and of all the planets these pirates could have been on, it was Mindoir. And of all the places they could have set up base, they set up here. Of all the batarians I could have encountered and enraged, I got one whose brother I murdered on Torfan. Coincidence only explains so much. And karma is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. It's nice to believe that there's pattern to the universe, even if that pattern is as simplistic as 'what goes around, comes around'. It gives me peace of mind."

Garrus was quiet for a moment, deep in thought if the slight vibration of his mandibles and the heavy look of concentration in his dark eyes was any indication. After a moment he nodded slowly. "Never an atheist in a fox hole?" He asked.

"I'm still an atheist. I don't believe in a god that has all the answers." She looked away, unable to meet his eyes as memories of the cold loneliness of death loomed in the small room. "It was too dark, and too silent when… when it happened. Just because the Bhagavad was written by people who believed in something I don't doesn't mean I can't appreciate the lessons it has to teach or the beauty of its poetry. If we're all part of each other, if we all come from the same place in the beginning and go to the same place in the end, than maybe, just maybe I have a chance at doing all I need to do, at unifying us all before the Reapers get here. I want to believe that I have that chance. Mostly, I want to believe that there's something meaningful in all this pain and suffering, in living and dying and killing. You would think that death would have cleared some of these questions up for me, but hell, it really just made them worse." She laughed at herself but he was shaking his head.

"If you value all life though, how can you be a soldier? How can you take life and love it at the same time?" He asked.

"Because it needs to be done. The most difficult thing you can possibly do is acknowledge the value of the lives you're taking, but it's an important step to becoming a complete person. It's tempting to label your opponents as mercs and slaver scum or some other colour of galactic garbage. It's tempting to feel justified in taking the lives of those who deserve to die. But that kind of thinking leads down a dark path that ends with nothing good for anyone. Thinking that way… it leads to things like Torfan."

She paused, her mind filled with the hellish smells and sounds of that place for a moment. It had been years, almost a decade, since she had fought her way through the bowels of that purple moon but thinking back on it still sent chills through her spine. Not because of what she had seen, but because of what she had felt, what she had become. "Thinking the way I do now has kept me away from that, has helped me keep the people I love away from that."

She looked back at him, focusing her dark eyes on his face. The unspoken name hovered between them in the still air and he met her glowing orange eyes with a tremor of anger stiffening his talons. They had moved past it, far enough past it, before going through the Omega-3 relay, but the thought of Sidonis still brought a disturbing darkness to Garrus' face. A darkness she recognized from her own mirror.

"Is that why you didn't let me kill him? Because you were worried about my karma?" He asked, his voice less sympathetic and understanding than it had been moments ago. She just shrugged helplessly and nodded.

"Sidonis was a traitor. He deserved to die." She said. "But you didn't deserve to kill him Garrus. That was what it was really about, wasn't it? You wanted to kill him because he deceived and manipulated you as much as because of what he did to your men."

He looked like he wanted to deny it, but he could not find any words. After a moment he ducked his head and they both knew she was right. After a moment he finally managed to speak, a rasp of charged emotion. "I wanted to kill him so bad, Shepard. I still do. If it had been anyone else standing between me and him…" He stopped himself.

"Do you wish I had stepped out of the way though? Do you really not realize the sort of darkness you invite in when you kill for revenge like that?" She asked.

"Of course I do." He snapped. "I know what you did was right, that the moral choice was to let him go. But it's hard to pitch all my faith on the idea that the obscure happenings of the universe will strike him down for what he did eventually."

"That's not the way karma works." She replied. "Cause and effect doesn't necessarily mean he'll die painfully because he caused death. It just means that eventually, in one way or another, he'll have to face the consequences of what he did. But maybe, just maybe, he can make something good out of his regret, out of his second chance. You saw what he was like. He was already paying for what he did Garrus, paying with his life. It wasn't worth losing yourself just to punish him."

"I know that. In my head. Down here," he tapped his chest over where the turian heart was supposed to be, "it's not so simple to let go."

"I know." She said simply. "But you don't let it stop you. I'm so proud of you Garrus, of what you've become. I think you should know that."

There was silence again, heavy with dark thoughts and emotions. When he looked back up at her his eyes were inscrutable, his face unreadable. But he nodded, only slightly, and got up to throw the packaging his rations had come in onto the fire. "Thanks, Shepard." He said.

They did not speak again, and soon he retreated to his blankets and laid down to sleep. Shepard stayed up, watching the fire and let him sleep through the night. Even if she had wanted to keep watch in shifts, she knew she could not sleep. Not here. As much as she had come to terms with things here, she knew it would never be the same. What had happened here could never be fully made peace with, she would never again feel comfortable enough to close her eyes and surrender her consciousness to the terrors of the ghosts that haunted these houses. When dawn began to peak, she stirred him from his slumber and left him to eat breakfast as she gathered up the white cotton sheets she had taken from the laundry on the Normandy. They would have to get more when they docked, but white wrappings were as important as the flowers for all they represented. She carried them up to the hill above the ravine and squared her shoulders. Pre-combat had never been this nerve wracking, not even on the long flight to Ilos or the Collector base, but she went to the same still, numb place inside her that she had gone to then. It made it easier to descend the slippery slope, her boots slipping and skidding over loose stones and damp gravel. When she reached the first of the skeletons she had to take a deep, centering breath. Then, she got to work.

It could have been worse. Much worse. The elements had rotted away the flesh, leaving nothing but withered sinew and naked bone. She brushed the dirt off the first skeleton, arranging the limbs as best she could over the chest. Then she wrapped it in a sheet and tied the bundle securely closed to keep the skeleton from shifting when it was carried down to the pyre. By the time Garrus arrived, she could not tell how much later since time seemed to have stopped while she worked, he said nothing at the sight of the small pile of lovingly shrouded corpses she had piled. He lifted the first of them into his arms with a gentle respect she deeply appreciated and began carrying them toward the pyre. They went on like that, not speaking, through three hundred and twenty six skeletons, needing to go back and unwrap the bodies so the sheets could be reused. The sun was at its peak overhead when, sweating heavily, they hoisted the last shrivelled body into position.

"Do you want me to stay while you..?" Garrus asked, as she wiped her sweating face with the back of her hand. She shook her head no, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"It's tradition for only the family to prepare the bodies and go through the funeral rites. I'm the closest that exists for any of these people, and while I appreciate the help with getting them prepared… for this… I should respect what they would have wanted.." He nodded his understanding, and she went to wash herself with some of the water they had brought in their provisions. She had none of the scented, cleansing oils of her childhood, but she dressed herself in a clean change of clothes she had brought and lit a hastily constructed torch from the embers burning on the hearth. Garrus was packing up their remaining supplies and she met his eyes briefly before she strode through the doors to the wood and bones piled beneath the blazing summer sky.

The songs seemed pointless with only one voice and no music, but she sang them anyway, her voice halting and stalling on the heavy, archaic words at first and becoming clearer as memories surged back to the forefront. She raised the burning brand above her head as the chants ran through her, beseeching the guidance of Shiva, the calm judging hand of the lord of destruction and therefore rebirth. When the touched the flames to the first dry tinder it caught instantly and orange fire surged across the brittle wood, spreading with alarming speed. She had scraped the grass and debris away from the pile before lighting it and circled it once to make sure she had not missed anything. Finished, she sunk to her knees and looked up at the mounting inferno and the column of black smoke it was throwing into the sky.

"Should we go now?" Garrus asked, coming up beside her.

"No." She said quietly. She was not done. There was one thing she still needed to do before she could leave. "They would have wanted me to pray for them. Prayers from the living guide the dead in their return to Brahma. I'll come to the shuttle when I'm done."

He said nothing, she did not know if he nodded, if he understood, but she heard his retreating footsteps as she folded her hands in front of her and closed her eyes. Prayer was harder than song, harder than anything else about this process with her many resentments toward it and everything it represented. But she managed it eventually, the mechanics of it anyway. She opened her eyes and stared up at the pillar of smoke extending into the sky above, throwing great arcs of shadow across the earth as the words of devotion poured through her. Protect them, guide them through death, take them somewhere better. She meant every word, even if she did not believe in the great being they were supposedly directed at. She hoped that wherever they were in that vast consciousness after death, this meant something to them.

In the end though, whatever happened it meant something to her and it always would. She had come here to end things, to come to terms with what she felt and to honour the people she had loved while she lived here. When she stood, wiping the dust off her knees she knew she had accomplished that. Everything that she could do had been done. She felt purified, as she walked up the long hill to the landing pad for the last time, not glancing over her shoulder as the breeze blew hot smoke around her. The shuttle was waiting for her, Garrus already inside and typing at his omnitool.

"Eclipse has put a bounty out on your head, Shepard." He informed her. "Twenty thousand credits to whoever can bring them your body. Fifty thousand for whoever can bring you in alive." He looked up at her with the slightest touch of amusement in his dark eyes. "Tali thinks we should see how far we can push it up."

She sat down across from him, crossing her legs at the ankles and a small smile touched her lips. "Sounds like a good idea. I have a few places in mind where we could start."

He grinned at her in earnest, as the shuttle pulled away from the planet surface and they left the smear of orange fire behind them. "I'm listening." He said. "If you're going to make me your second-in-command I don't want to have anymore surprises like I got in Afterlife."

As the shuttle made its way back to the Normandy she lost herself in discussions of tactics, politics and strategy for the long-term and short-term. Encouragingly, by the time they made it to the elevator and emerged onto the crew deck almost an hour later, he was not acting like everything she said was insane. He was almost grinning as he made his way to the forward battery to change out of his armour and she watched him go before turning back to the holopad, wondering if she should go and change out of her own light Survival Suit and maybe raid the fridge. Her long fast had seemed natural on Mindoir, but now her stomach was growling loudly. Instead, she stepped out of the elevator and headed down the hallway toward life support.

"Rama?" She called into the dry, quiet air as the doors slid open. He looked up from his table as she entered, hesitating by the door and then striding with more confidence into the centre of the room. He said nothing and she felt some of that confidence falter, making her shift from foot to foot. "Are you ready to talk?"

"No." He answered finally. He looked like he had not slept much since she last saw him, his eyes hanging at an exhausted half-mast in his haggard face. "But I doubt I ever truly shall be, so I will. If you want to."

"I just want to know where I stand." She replied. "I'm sure you do to."

"Indeed." He answered. When it became apparent she would not sit he stood as well. They looked each other up and down, hands drawn behind their backs and faces unreadable. At length, she realized that she was trying to stare him down, trying to keep control in a situation where control was neither important nor reasonable. Neither one of them controlled the other, therefore neither one could expect to control this, whatever it was. As her face and posture softened his did as well, if only slightly. "I think you might have been right when you hesitated. At the start of this. Further thought seems to suggest it was a bad idea."

She felt as though she had taken a blow to the gut and retreated across the room in order to escape the weight of his gaze on her. She looked out over the drive core, down to where she could see Tali working at her station. She looked right through the young quarian, through everything. "You think so?" She asked, not trusting herself to say anything else.

"I don't think you know what you want from this." He said. He had followed her, but only a little ways, stopping behind her and not pressing any closer. She could still feel him in the air, smell the faint spice of his skin and sense his dark eyes on her. "But I don't think I can give you anything, anyway. I am not at a point in my life where I have anything to give."

"I don't want anything from you, Rama." She replied, shaking her head. "You're the one that seems to think I do."

"Perhaps." He said softly. "But you do need things, Shepard. You need to focus, you need to keep yourself on track. I don't want to distract you. I don't want to make things harder for you."

"Is that really why you're hesitating?" She asked, turning around and facing him. He met her eyes for a moment and then glanced away, stung by something he saw there. It had been so long since he had used her real name in conversation that it sounded strange to her, wounded her almost as much as his admission of doubt had in the first place. "I told you not to hesitate on my account. I can decisions for my own good without your help, Thane."

"I…" He still could not meet her eyes. "I don't know. It feels like I should stop this, before it goes to far, before I fall too deeply into it and cannot escape it."

"Escape what? What are you afraid of?" She asked, keeping her voice under control. She was trying to understand, trying her hardest, but dragging this confession out of him was taxing her strained nerves. She had just repaired a huge portion of her life, gotten things under control that had been raging unabated for years. She did not need something new cropping up now.

"You. The things you make me feel, the thoughts you inspire." He said finally. "If we keep doing what we're doing, I won't be able to stop myself from loving you. I can already feel it happening. When I thought that you might die, I realized I did not know what I would do if you did. It scares me, this uncertainty, this instability. I have looked for balance all my life, meditated and prayed to find it and clung to it in an effort to steady my hand and actions. I have tried to make things clear, simple and direct. But you…" He trailed off and his eyes finally found hers again. She could see so many things in his eyes that it was difficult to isolate one feeling, one emotion. "I just want to do what is right. For you, for me, for the galaxy."

"You think I'll make you do things that are wrong?" She asked. "You must know me better than that."

"I have no doubt you will eternally lead me toward the greatest of rights." He replied. "I don't know if I am strong enough, if I am good enough, to follow your examples though. Being awake, the emotions it entails, can lead toward great compassion. It can also lead toward great anger and cruelty when things are twisted the wrong way. It is important for me to stay spiritually pure."

They stared at each other then, without speaking. Her loose, chin length blond curls framing her round face made her look so young, even now, but the hardness in her eyes and the set of her shoulders betrayed all appearance of innocence or naïve youth as a lie. She was as hard as him, as world-weary, and as scared of everything that existed between them as he was. But she was not going to run away, when she got scared she followed through anyway. No matter what.

"I'm not going to run away from what I feel for you." She said finally, running her fingers through her hair and feeling them come away soaked with cold sweat. "But I can't force you into anything either. So is this really what you want? To end this before it even really goes anywhere? Because if you really want me to walk away, to let everything go so you can remain pure, I will."

He hesitated, torn for a long moment. "No." He answered, his hands falling from behind his back to his sides. He bowed his head. "I don't want that. But one cannot always do what one wants. Sometimes there are greater needs."

"So you need to end it?" She asked, moving closer. She stopped right in front of him, not touching him but close enough to feel the warmth of his skin radiating through the air, close enough that every inhale filled her with the spicy, alien smell of him. "You need to give up… whatever this is? This connection that exists between us?"

He looked up at her again, only briefly, his tormented eyes revealing the depths of his uncertainty to her. "I don't know." He confessed. "That is why I have lingered in here. Because I cannot force my feelings away in the name of what I think must be done. Because I cannot just let go and fade back into my battle sleep. Because I love the feeling of being alive so fiercely that it has made me selfish."

He sounded disgusted with himself, ashamed. She raised one hand and laid it gently against his cheek and felt him flinch, but he did not pull away. After a moment, he raised his own hand and placed it gently over hers, his eyes finally rising from the floor to meet hers.

"You know where I stand." She said softly. His large eyes were clear, she could see the blush of colour around his pupil that was often lost in darkness with perfect clarity. His eyes were green, but not the same vibrant reptilian hue of his scales. They were a deep, twilight green that reminded her of the faded world under Mindoir's spectacular canopy, of the scent decaying coniferous needles and damp bark. "When you figure things out… I'll be waiting. And no matter what the answer might be, you'll always have a place here."

His hand tensed over hers, gently, but she could still feel it through the padding on the back of her glove. After a moment she dropped her hand back to her side and he did the same. Neither of them spoke, and she gave him a small nod before stepping around him, heading for the door. She did not trust herself to speak, or to look back at him now. Doing what was right could sometimes be incredibly difficult.

After showering, and getting dressed she realized that she had lost her appetite. The Normandy was once more en route to a new colony, and then onward to more Eclipse lackeys to kill and people to liberate. The White Knight was back in action. Suddenly though, she did not feel as though she had accomplished anything. Sighing, she pulled off her clean clothes and collapsed onto her bed, watching the stars zip past her open window before she drifted off to sleep.


	18. 18

A/N: This chapter contains some sexiness. It's toward the end though, and some important things happen in the mean time. Fair warning.

Something was different. She could feel it in the fibre of her bones, in the pulse of her blood, in the chaotic firing of her nervous system as the last rumble of collapsing girders shook the tiny room they were storming and the hysterical screaming of enemies caught in the rubble of steel and sparking cables slowly were cut off by short, decisive blasts of gunfire. A single blast of biotic energy had done that, propelling a shrieking man in Eclipse armour through the air, shattering his body and killing him almost instantly. The armour, broken by the impact, had been what sliced through the ceiling, shattering supports and cutting electrical cables until a huge portion of the roof had simply given way on top of their attackers. All that had been left for her team mates to do was clean up, as she stepped around the stacked storage bins and chambered another round in her shotgun. She did not bother replacing the thermal clip, she had only used one bullet.

"Is it just me, or do are these guys actually getting easier to kill?" She asked, glancing over at Tali and Jack who were picking their way over the pile of debris now blocking the door. She kicked a shattered, blood-spattered helmet out of her way as she moved to follow them, her boot sinking into something soft that she pointedly did not look down at as she climbed over rafters and skirted an aggressively sparking cable as thick as her arm.

"It's just you." Jack grumbled, obviously upset at having missed out on what had promised to be good carnage when they had broken into the room and discovered the surprise squad. "Fuck Shepard, I've never seen this side of you before. You're moving faster and harder, your biotics are getting more badass by the day, and you don't even seem to blink as you tear people apart with them. If you'd been like this the whole time, taking out Collectors would have been a lot more fun."

Shepard shook her head and hooked her hands onto the door frame before sliding feet first through the narrow passage left open between the top of the door and the five foot pile of junk metal. Her boots sent a hollow ringing noise up and down the hallway as she landed, and she glanced both ways, noting close corners and lots of doors. Ideal for close combat, which was what their little threesome excelled at more than anything else. She adjusted her grip on the gun and motioned them forward with a flick of her helmeted head.

"She's right, Shepard." Tali commented, her voice quiet and cautious as it always was in combat situations. Her large, pale eyes shone through the opaque glass of her helmet and met those of her commander as they made their way to the first door. Shepard hit the holopad with one fist and the door slid open, revealing a stark, empty room. "You are getting better. More powerful."

"You were the one that dared me to get my Eclipse bounty to a million credits. I'm just trying really hard." Shepard replied, repeating the process on the next door they came to and finding a small card table and chairs set up. Abandoned poker chips littered the table and she flipped over one of the pairs of cards set on either side of the pot. "Someone was bluffing." She grinned as she picked up the data pad someone had left on the table and uploaded its contents to the Normandy data banks. She would have EDI pick through it later, sort out the junk from the things they could use. It was amazing, the sorts of useful odds and ends one could pick up in that fashion.

"You're already almost there." She pointed out. "Six hundred thousand credits dead, eight hundred thousand alive."

"Well we did attack that frigate in the Sarrla system and space, what was it, seven hundred kilograms of red sand? What did EDI say that much was worth?" Shepard pointed out as they continued the less-than-enthralling task of combing the poorly guarded compound. Occasionally they would find swag, or drugs that Shepard marked on her map for later disposal, but most of the rooms were barren cells, eight feet by eight feet with no windows or distinguishing characteristics. By the time they found another hallway, her mind was itching with the need to move on. They made their way down it, the flare of red light indicating a locked door ahead.

"Approximately seventeen million eight hundred thousand credits." EDI responded promptly. "For Eclipse alone. That figure does not take into account the loss of profit for vendors and intermediaries."

"Hell, I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been an assassination attempt yet." Shepard replied. "Then again, I guess it's hard to assassinate someone who never shows up anywhere but at your front door with her gun already drawn. It would be hard to sneak onboard the Normandy, especially when she's cloaked and hanging in the middle of space."

She bent down in front of the circuit board for the locked door as Jack and Tali took point positions, pressed up against the narrow slivers of the steel walls flanking the wide door. Shepard activated her barrier with a thought and a flare of blue fire in her eyes, and when the door slid open the first panicked shots of their attackers flattened themselves ineffectually against it.

"Maybe they figure they can't hire an assassin for more than the bounty they're already offering." Tali reasoned as she released her combat drone among the rocket troops hiding behind the meaty shield of disorganized frontlines men. "I wouldn't want to meet the man who charges eighty five hundred thousand credits a kill."

Shepard grinned. "I would." She replied, before swinging around the corner and peppering the assembled troops with blasts of buckshot. Jack sent a wave of pulsing biotics at them as they struggled to reciprocate, screaming wordlessly at each other in an attempt to form up a rank. The turret behind them swivelled from side to side as Tali's omnitool glowed bright orange and a moment later it was delivering a devastating wave of bullets into their obviously surprised backs. As the narrow passage filled with the sounds and smells of death Shepard released a handful of spinning biotic energy that tore a man nearly in half as it connected, sending him spinning back in a curtain of blood. She cocked her head to the side as she watched him land and slide away in a jumble of broken bones and torn flesh, leaving a sticky crimson trail in his wake.

"I think you guys are right. I didn't even notice it before, but my biotics are getting stronger." She bit her lip as she wondered why that might be. Maybe all the meditation she had found herself doing, consciously and unconsciously, was having more of an effect on her than she had previously thought. After a moment, she shrugged, dismissing the quandary for now. "Oh well. I'm not going to complain."

She smashed the turret to pieces with another blast of biotic energy, now that their opponents were dead. As they picked their way through the bodies, moving steadily forward, she wondered how high her biotic abilities could really go. She had always used them as an asset to a gun, not as a primary means of attack and defence, but she had found herself using them more and more lately. She was sure she was as powerful as Kaidan had been when they started working together on the Normandy, maybe even more so. It was strange, but as she had said, not unwelcome. She needed all the edge she could get, the steadily mounting Eclipse bounty being a fun thing to joke about to lighten the mood during ground assaults but something quite different when she was forming strategy or thinking alone in her quarters as she sought sleep. It was just one of many concerns that continued to make sleep difficult.

It was easier now, at least easier than it had been, with fewer night terrors filling her mouth with sticky bile and coating her with cold sweat. But stress took its own kind of toll on everyone, and doctor Chakwas had pointedly refused to give her anymore sleeping pills when she had asked. This had made her angry at first, until she realized that it was precisely because of that attitude that the doctor had decided not to give her any. Now, when dark thoughts or anxiety kept her awake her only choice was to try to meditate or resign herself to working and hoping that her mind would eventually clear itself and allow her to drift off. Irritating, but manageable.

There were other things that were both more and less easy to deal with, at least on a day to day basis. She could feel her thoughts wander to the cold absence of her drell… boyfriend? Lover? Gentleman caller? Whatever he was, he had not been around much since their last conversation. He still perfected the brutally effective combat unit she had formed with Garrus, and thus she had often brought him on missions where they had performed with the emotionless professionalism that typified life-long soldiers. Their combat was just as fluid, just as full of the unspoken synchrony that had made it what it was. Only the shuttle rides had been awkward, Garrus tapping his boots against the floor in an effort to lessen the intense silence that hung between them. Shepard had eventually started just staring out the window the entire time, not trusting herself to make eye contact with either of them. It was always a relief to clamber out and kill things, if only to release the tension that collected throughout her muscles during the ride. Almost a month had passed, and he gave her no answer, still locked in his personal battle. She was beginning to lose hope.

Hope for what? It was a question she did not want to answer, not even in her own inner monologues. She wanted him to be happy, of course, and would support whatever decision he made with that in mind. But her heart, and her body, longed for him to give in to what she was offering, to come back to the warmth of her arms and her bed. The thought of her own selfishness brought a frown to her face as a new wave of enemies surged around the corner, led by a military looking woman with iron gray hair and a long scar streaking down the left side of her face. She let out a long battle cry at the sight of their invading party and Jack trilled her response as the narrow hallway erupted into a sea of bullets and noise.

The blue flare of her biotic barriers absorbed waves of bullets as Shepard darted ahead, swinging her heavy krogan shotgun in an arch before her. Toppling one with a blast to the kneecap sent him reeling into the sights of his companions, who roared and thrashed in an effort to get around him. She rounded on the commander as she came running forward, shoulder tucked in and made rough contact with the side of her chest. Shepard felt her armour absorb most of the heavy impact of her elbow in her gut and heard it crack solidly against the other woman's shoulder. She sank the butt of her gun into her gut and heaved forward, tossing her to the ground. She swung the shotgun down to her as she shook her head, pupils dilated and out of focus.

"Don't-" She managed before a gale of lead erased her face. Shepard stepped over the headless, spasming corpse and unleashed a heaving biotic shockwave that tore up the hallway, tossing mercenaries in the air like rag dolls. Jack and Tali stood on either side and effortlessly double-tapped the bodies that came thudding back down, denting the steel floors. Shepard leaned to the side and rubbed the back of her neck under the helmet, one eyebrow cocked at the mess they had made.

"Ten points." Jack breathed, sounding impressed. Shepard made a face at her, but did not argue. She glanced back at the body of the commander and breathed a sigh of disgust, stomping over and kicking the body in the shoulder. As the ruin of her throat and lower jaw lolled to the side she saw the embossing on the shoulder that had been painted over with the typical dark orange of Eclipse. Blood ran along the grooves of the N7, making it stand out all the more and she holstered her shotgun at the small of her back.

"EDI, this woman is wearing N7 armour." She pressed her hand against the side of her helmet to seal the sound cancelling silicone around her ear. There was a moment of silence and the AI spoke softly in her ear.

"Records show that this ship, the Abraham, is captained by a formal Alliance general by the name of Shirley Prescott. She was an N7 of some renown, who was declared missing in action and spent a year isolated on a foreign planet before she managed to send a distress signal. When she returned she was deemed unstable by the Alliance and relieved of duty." Shepard scratched at her forehead as she looked down at the body. Prescott sounded familiar, and after a moment EDI confirmed it. "She was the captain of the Melaka Ru garrison, the five men and women who held off a rogue krogan invasion."

"A goddamn hero." Shepard breathed. "Fuck, we learnt her anti-krogan close combat manoeuvres in Command School."

"Indeed, they are studied by all organized military operations." EDI confirmed. "It seems she abandoned the Alliance after they ruled her as unstable, claiming they had no grounds for their ruling. The details of it are highly classified, however, so I cannot determine whether there was any validity to that claim."

The irony did not escape her as she turned away from the rapidly cooling body. The fallen hero, defamed by all who knew her was a role that Shepard knew well but there was no time to dwell on such dark signs now. She had the rest of this base to clear out, and a dozen colonies to review before she could make her next move. She would think of it tonight, as the stars passed ceaselessly past the window overhead and she played her fleeting game with rest.

"See if you can find anything more about her if you have the time EDI." She said, ejecting her thermal clip and retrieving a new one from the ammo packs mounted on her thighs. It slid in with a satisfying click that kept her mind focused tightly on the task at hand. She had become expert at this, this careful cancelling of emotional responses. It was natural to keep the world at arms length when most people you encountered ended up with their brains all over the floor.

"Of course. Also, Thane is asking to see you as you return to the ship. He says the matter is quite urgent." She paused at that, the purr of EDI's computerized voice sending ripples of dread through her focused battle calm. She shook herself once and squared her shoulders, not sure what to think of that and unwilling to lose herself in thoughts of it.

"Tell him to wait for me in my quarters. I'll see him as soon as I get back." She ordered, before tapping the radio to signal the end of the conversation. They pressed ahead, eliminating the last three engineers that crouched in the next room without much trouble. They fought with the grim, lock-jawed determination of dead men, none of them making so much as a sound as they were gunned down and torn apart by blue fire. Shepard stepped over their bodies to raid the terminals for information and hack a banking terminal, funnelling dirty money into accounts that would build evaporators and schools on distant, thus far victimized world. Jack's moniker of Robin Hood had not been misplaced, only a small percentage of the mercenary funds went into Shepard's own account. She had killed so many Eclipse by this point that even her slim takings had accumulated into more than enough to keep the ship running smoothly.

As they piled back into the shuttle, Tali began to take her shotgun apart and clean it on impulse and Jack sat with her legs stretched over the seat and picked distractedly at her teeth. After a moment she shot Shepard a thoughtful look and turned, letting her boots rest on the floor, and put her hands on her knees.

"So, trouble in paradise Boss Lady?" She asked, cocking one eyebrow over her large, eternally predatory eyes. Shepard, who had been rubbing the sweat out of her now shoulder-length and hair looked up at her with no humour in her orange and black eyes. Her lips twitched and she looked back down at her boots.

"That's really none of your business." She said quietly. Jack, undeterred, just grinned and leaned back, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Trouble in bed maybe? I always heard drell were a handful in the sack, but Krios looks like a bit of wet blanket. Or maybe a limp one, hey?" She seemed to delight putting her commander on the spot in this fashion. "Though you were gone for twenty hours that time, so maybe-"

"Thane is just fine in the sack." Shepard snapped. "More than fine. I said it was none of your business, Jack."

The hardness of her tone managed to get the other woman to reel it in, and silence stretched once more in the small room. Tali looked between the two of them and paused as though she might say something but Shepard just shook her head and snapped her helmet back in place. The visor hid her eyes and made it easy to pretend she did not notice the looks that passed between them as she crossed her arms and tapped one foot against the floor of the shuttle. Luckily, the Normandy was already passing close overhead, the shuttle bay door yawning wide to receive them. Moments later she was standing, one foot on the first step of the ramp before it had even finished lowering itself. As she climbed down the ramp and headed for the stairs up to the engineering deck, the young quarian hurried up beside her.

"Shepard, I wanted to talk to you." She said, lacing her fingers in front of her and glancing over her shoulder at Jack in a nervous way. Shepard glanced over and felt a finger of irritation jabbing at the back of her brain, making the slightest of frowns touch the middle of her forehead. It seemed like every time she squared away the slightest problem, the moment she took care of anything, there was another issue cropping up that seemed to demand her and only her. She raised one hand as they came to the door that led to Tali's station in engineering.

"Can it wait please? I already have someone who needs to see me 'right away'." The other woman hesitated and then nodded slowly, the expressionless glass of her helmet making it ever impossible to determine what she was thinking or feeling. Quarians had always been described as an emotionally eloquent people, going into extreme detail on the subject of their emotions to compensate for the fact they could not visually express themselves. Tali had always been on the quiet side though, always holding a little bit of herself back. Shepard realized now, that she never really knew what she was thinking.

\

"Of course. I understand." She said, her voice flat and monotone. Shepard felt a twinge of concern, but she had already made a promise. She was probably just stressed, she reasoned as the three of them parted ways, each heading to their own nook of the ship to unwind and clean up after the hard, bloody battle. Shepard waited until she was safe in the elevator before she pulled her helmet off and took a few deep, calming breaths. She hesitated before reaching out and instructing the elevator to take her to the loft. Had she not just been wishing that he would reach out to her? Had she not been angry at him for holding back? Why this hesitation now, when he was urgent to see her?

She knew the answer when the door slid quietly open in the small hall outside her door. Fear. She stepped out of the elevator hearing it rushing in the back of her mind, a mindless stream of stomach-churning panic. She dreaded what might be said in there, what he might have chosen. Surely he would not have waited this long, only to tell her now that he had decided her wanted to be with her after all. She took another deep breath, tightening her core muscles and attempting to keep her shoulders steady. She would do this gracefully, make it as easy on the both of them as possible. There would be time for trembling and sagging when she was alone.

"Thane?" He turned from the window as she spoke his name, as though broken from deep thought. She knew instantly that this was not about them and the circling question of what it was that existed between them. His eyes were sharp, hard and slightly desperate. Something was very wrong and as he moved forward with the smooth, predatory gate he used during combat she knew that he was close to the edge.

"Shepard. Something has gone wrong with Kolyat on the Citadel. He has been accused of murdering that criminal we interrogated, Elias Kelham." His voice was quick, full of tense energy as he paced in front of her, between the blank wall and her empty fish tanks. His gaze, when it flickered to her as she put her helmet down on the desk, was wracked with worry. He looked almost pale.

"Who would have a reason to frame Kolyat?" She asked. He shook his head and raised both hands helplessly at the question, the futility of it obviously frustrating. She sighed and hit the yellow nodes that held the air-tight seal on her gauntlets and under layer. It made a faint hissing sound as cool air rushed in, gelling the hot sweat lingering on her skin as she tugged them down her arms and laid them on the desk beside her helmet. "What did he say?"

"Not much, he was in shock. Just that C-Sec had him in custody and that Bailey was working on getting him out. Elias was killed four hours ago, but no one will tell him how or where. They haven't checked his alibi or charged him with anything formally. Yet." He began pacing again, his steps quick, full of explosive energy.

"Joker?" She called into the heights of the low ceiling. After a moment the pilots sarcastic drawl crackled over the intercom, emanating from unseen speakers.

"Yes, commander?" He asked. "How might we serve the great White Knight of the Terminus Systems?"

"You can set a course for the Citadel." She instructed crisply. "By the quickest route possible."

"Aye, aye ma'am. I know people are longing to take in the elcor Hamlet they've got playing there." The pilot replied. She could hear him rolling his eyes as clearly as though she was standing beside him in the cock pit. She allowed the briefest of smiles to touch her lips at the image, and turned back to Thane with a nod.

"We'll find out what's going on with your son, Thane." She promised. "I won't let anything happen to him."

"Thank you." He sounded relieved, as though he had not been sure what to expect from her and she just nodded again. Now that they had removed the greatest urgency from the air they were faced with the twelve plus hours it would take to navigate to the Citadel from their current position. Shepard knew she should be reviewing strategy, confirming garrison strength and answering messages from the various heads of colonies that were now relying on her for information or protection. But she just wanted to be with him, to make sure he was alright, to soothe his obviously troubled mind. The distance between them seemed so huge though, and she knew this was not the time to pursue the question of their relationship.

"If you need anything…" She began, and stopped, not wanting to pressure him. After a moment she shrugged, the weight of her armour making her shoulders ache with the simple action. She reached up and pressed the yellow nodes holding it in place, twisting them out of their moorings until they released their snug grip and she could slide the heavy metal plates off, letting them fall to the floor. Sighing, she unzipped her under layer to her belt and scratched at an itch nestled between her ribs as she cracked her neck. "Well… you know where I am."

He nodded, taking a step closer to her and she could still not read what was happening on his face. There was the usual worry, the strain that pulled his brows down over his large eyes, making him look almost sleepy. But the intensity of his gaze bespoke his own kind of want, a need that was physical as much as emotional. She felt her skin prickle under his gaze, the air suddenly cold against the golden brown skin exposed by her open zipper, an unbroken stripe from throat to navel. Her under layer had better support built into it than any bra could hope to rival.

"I should go." He said finally, but when he moved it only brought him closer to her. She did not budge, just met his eyes as he stopped an arms length away from her. They looked at each other for a long moment, both of them hesitating on the edge of what they wanted and what they needed to do.

"You don't have to." She said finally. "You-"

She did not get to finish that thought, because he was suddenly pulling her against him, and pushing her backwards in the same motion as his head darted down and she felt his mouth close over hers. Her arms folded over his shoulders, drawing him closer as his tongue surged forward, pressing into her mouth with undisguised desperation. She felt her desk hit the back of her thighs and he was lifting her up, setting her down on top of it and pushing away anything that got in their way as he wedged himself between her thighs. She felt him suck her bottom lip into his mouth and bite down as she sighed, her head falling back. He laced his fingers into her hair and kissed her chin, the soft place behind her ear, the curve of her neck scented with the bitter salt of battle. She ran her hands across the back of his head, down his neck, and across his shoulder as he bit down on her neck, making an aggressive sound in the back of his throat and she gasped at the sudden sharp sting.

"Thane…" She sighed his name as he pulled the tight fitting under layer down her arms, cold air rushing in to touch her everywhere, making her skin prickle and sing. When he touched her again his hands were like tracks of fire, melting and splitting the cold that gripped her. One hand circled her breast and she felt him grip her nipple, twisting it sharply between his fingers and pressing his hips into hers every time she gasped and moaned. His other hand twisted her mostly discarded under layer behind her back, locking her wrists in a knot of fabric. "Are you..?"

"Shepard." He looked up only briefly from the curve of her neck as he skated his hand down her stomach, across the tensing lines of her abdomen. "Please. Don't say anything."

She could only nod as she felt his tongue drop back to her throat, skating down the line of her jugular vein. She could feel him press close, sensing the pulse of her heart under her flushed skin and he bit down over the warmth of her life blood, shuddering as her strong legs wrapped around his hips. She could feel how badly he wanted her, how badly he needed her, already and despite what misgivings she might have if she were to think about it rationally her own mindless physical demands were taking over. Despite everything that told her this was the wrong decision to make she pressed herself forward, up into the wet heat of his mouth as he bent slightly at the knees, both arms falling to hold her hands in place behind her back as he nuzzled the cloth away from her breast and sucked her nipple into his mouth, flickering his tongue over it until it hardened and then moving to the other. She heard herself beginning to curse as he brushed his smooth, flat teeth over her and nipped, hard enough to draw a sharp gasp from her lips and send a tremor down her spine to her hot, wet core. She tried to pull her arms out of the firm knots he had twisted in the reinforced cloth around her wrists but he held her in place with one hand as he stood and pulled her belt open with the other.

He managed to work her armour open wide enough to slide his hand down, over the thin cotton of the small pair of underwear which was all she ever wore under all her armour. He had as little trouble finding the centre of her female pleasure as he had the first time, parting the folds of her sex to stroke her with unerring dexterity. She gasped, and struggled against his grip on her again, wanting to tear at his clothes, to wrap her arms around his neck and hold on as he slid his fingers down, exploring her fully and then back up, stroking her in quick circles that made her entire body tremble against him. Her eyes slid closed at the explosive sensations mingled with the warmth of his psychotropic kisses spreading through her mind. The cold all around her contrasted with the heat of his body and her own sweltering arousal and made every touch of his lips against her goose pimpled neck and breasts almost as powerful as the work of his fingers below. When he pushed the soaking fabric of her panties aside and slid his finger into her she threw her head back and moaned his name helplessly, her body spasming around him.

She wondered how someone who had never had a human lover before could know exactly where to touch her to drive her pleasure to such heights. Her forehead fell against his shoulder, her thighs tensing and trembling on either side of his hips as he mercilessly drove her forward, her breath coming in short, heavy gasps as hot sweat beaded across her forehead. He slipped his conjoined fingers inside her and she groaned, trying to pull her arms out of his grip one more time only to have him growl and tighten his hold, pulling her back and latching into her neck as she exposed it to him, the sudden slight pain of his teeth closing over her pushing her closer to the edge. She writhed, gasping his name as his tongue flickered across her throat and down over her shoulder where he bit her again, gentler this time. It made no difference, she was so far gone that anything he did could have finished her, and she cried out, almost sobbing as he quickened his pace and was there, smashing into her orgasm with such force that her hips lifted off the desk and he finally lost his grip on her. Tugging her arms free she wrapped them around his neck and hung suspended against his body, trembling until he finally pulled his hand away from her and the aftershocks became manageable. She slumped back against her desk, the medal of honour she kept framed beside her console digging suddenly into her back.

He was not interested in waiting, waiting would allow the reality of what they were doing to sink in too far, would make them realize what a terrible decision they were making. It was pure physical need that drove him to pick her up again and carry her with swift, eager speed to the bed. The soft light of the barren fish tanks caught on the sweaty sheen of her skin and the curls of her hair as he tossed her down, painting her golden body in shades of blue. She grabbed frantically at the armour nodes that were still clamped in place on her thighs, knees and boots, heavy metal plates falling away as she kicked out of her under layer and panties. As she finally clawed her left boot off, the entire process made harder by the fact that the hallucinations were on her again, making the edges and details of everything distant and indistinct he was beside her on the bed, turning her over onto her stomach as she struggled to get her swimming head in order. She grabbed onto the headboard as he pulled her to her knees, remembering Mordin's excessively helpful scientific diagrams that had told her this was more common for unmarried drell than face-to-face intercourse.

She squeezed her eyes closed as she felt him slide into her and heard his heavy grunt of pleasure, his hands tightening on her hips as he paused for a moment and then began to move. There was nothing tender or gentle in their coupling, no dark need warring for priority with their deep affection for each other. The situation was too strange, too complex to be further complicated with emotions. He reached for her shoulder and then, after a moment of thought, grabbed a handful of her hair to hold her in place she shuddered and felt her fingers clench on the head board, knuckles burning as he pushed harder and faster against her, moving against all the right places but somehow doing nothing for her. As his grip tightened, yanking her head back slightly and he moaned she felt her teeth grit and opened her eyes, staring out the wide, panoramic windows at the deep void of space. She could hear his breath coming faster as he leaned over her, faster and harder, faster and harder, until she could feel nothing but a distant ache where he was pounding into her again and again. He did not last long, which surprised neither of them, and by the time he let her go and slid out of her she was already past the hard adrenaline and need of the moment and deeply into her regret.

As she turned onto her side and folded her arms around herself she heard him sigh and fall on top of the blanket in similar numb exhaustion. After a moment she heard him turn to look at her and make a small, wordless sound of concern.

"Did I hurt you?" He asked, and she felt his hand on her hip, trying to turn her over. She did not let him, just continued to stare at the fish tanks. The sway and waver of the fake plants in the water was strangely bleak, the traces they left through the lifeless water catching her eyes and holding them steadily. She could not let her concentration break, not now when she was so close to a hundred intense and conflicted emotion.

"No." She answered, her voice hollow and empty to her own ears.

He hesitated a moment, and then she heard him get up, the bed shifting as his weight left it. She squeezed her eyes closed and curled her legs up until she was mimicking the fetal position. The air seemed brutally cold to her, and she realized she was shivering slightly, but she did not have the energy to make it under the blankets. She could feel him looking at her and wanted him to just put his clothes on and get out so she could scream and throw things and be angry. The flicker of rage building in her chest was the only heat left in her, and she latched onto it, shivering transitioning seamlessly into a helpless, angry trembling. After a moment the bed bent under his weight again and she felt his hands on her, suddenly gentle again.

"I'm sorry." He whispered against her hair, running his hand gently down her side, to the place where his grip would leave bruises against her hip bones.

She wanted him to go, to get out, so she could give in to the mindless anger and frustration that was possessing her mind. But after a moment she just sighed and felt her body gradually let go, the rage slipping slowly away in the face of his sincerity. She deserved better than this. She deserved an answer, she deserved to know how she stood with him, what he wanted, but as ever her self-important entitlements and anger ended up just fading away in the face of how much she cared for him, how thoroughly she understood what it was like to war with your spiritual side. She let him wrap his arms around her and pull her against his chest. She felt his tears fall, warm against the curve of her neck as he gripped her tightly against his chest and buried his face in her hair.

"I'm sorry." He said again and she just shook her head, relieving them both of the need to speak any longer. The stars flew mindlessly by all around them, cold and distant and pointless despite their monumental size and nuclear fires. The only warmth she felt was his heart pressed against her back, his grief against her neck as he faded slowly out, his grip relaxing and his breath becoming steady. She did not sleep, just laid awake and watched the universe pass all around her,


	19. 19

Her eyes were aching when she finally leaned back in her seat and closed the mind-bogglingly long list of her personal messages. Her head was pounding, and she squeezed the throbbing bridge of her nose between two fingers as she took a deep breath and pushed herself to her feet. It had been eight hours since her ill-fated liaison with Thane and her inner muscles still ached so fiercely that it made walking normally difficult. She forced herself not to adopt the awkward but more comfortable crab-walk she had been forced to use earlier as she made her way into the bathroom for something to take the edge off her headache. She had already seen the damage that could do.

The look on his face still brought a flicker of worry to her eyes when she remembered it. She had gotten up to get a glass of water, bruises already darkening to purple along her hip bones and cleaned herself up, thinking that Thane's overpowering exhaustion afforded her a little privacy. Although he had not done any real damage, the discomfort had driven her to wincing and swearing as she made her way down the stairs. She had not noticed him watching her, a lifetime of his own wars making him as light a sleeper as she. When she had finally seen him, and seen the look of absolute self-disgust on his face, it had been far too late to reassure him.

He had dressed quickly, deaf to her vain attempts to assure him it was not really that bad, that she was as much to blame for it as him. As he shrugged his jacket on, he had turned to look at her very briefly.

"I'm sorry." He had said, sounding as dead as he had the day she met him in the tower overlooking the skyline of Nos Astra. "For everything."

And he had left. She had not seen him since. There was work to be done, garrisons had to be mobilized to defend themselves in her absence from the immediate systems. Vysery, and a few others, seemed confident in their abilities to defend themselves, their colonies already reaping the rich rewards of their alliance with her. Others were more difficult to assure, and she had spent hours spoon-feeding them positive reinforcement as her frustration grew to breaking point. Now, finally, she had squared as much of that away as was possible and she could relax. For another four hours, before she had to go help Thane save his son again.

She was not looking forward to that mission. She was not looking forward to the inevitable lull in action that would come with Rapid Transit and stakeouts and the whole manner of calm pockets amid the inevitable chaos of life. She had a feeling they would make the tomb-like silences of the shuttle rides in the last while seem like cordial banter.

"Shepard, Tali would like to know if you have time to speak with her now." EDI chimed, appearing at the console on the far side of the room. Shepard swore violently at herself for having forgotten that Tali needed to see her and sighed, rubbing fiercely at her red, tired eyes.

"Tell her I'll be there in five minutes." Shepard instructed. She took a long moment to breath deeply, the rhythmic expansion of her rib cage and lungs settling a kind of temporary calm over her troubled thoughts. She did not have time for proper meditation, so a few deep breaths would have to do. Squaring her shoulders, she left her room and the protective cocoon of calm it afforded her and headed toward the elevator and the next burden that demanded her personal attention.

She found Tali in her usual space in engineering, her fingers frozen above the keypad as she stared blankly at something that existed well beyond the steel wall in front of her. Data pads and tools were scattered across her normally immaculate workstation, projects and repairs that had been picked up and abandoned when something else caught the normally focused young quarian's attention span. Shepard raised an eyebrow and cleared her throat into a cupped hand. The sound made Tali jump and turn suddenly, hands raised in positions of surprise. When she caught the grin on Shepard's face she dropped them and put them on her hips, striking a pose that was clearly unimpressed.

"Daydreaming?" Shepard asked, coming up beside her and glancing at the engine schematics flashing across the screen. Ceaseless columns of numbers that made no sense to her seemed to read like a language to Tali and the engineers. The quarian saved and closed her work before responding, the console fading into its inactive mode as she waved one two fingered hand and led her commander away from the main engineering deck. Shepard wondered where they were going, as Tali led her wordlessly out into the main hall and down to the unoccupied cargo hold. By the time she stopped, looking out over the rows of neatly stacked and meticulously labelled crates Shepard's curiosity was burning out of control.

"Shepard, there's something important I need to tell you." She said finally, not turning to face her. Her posture was rigid, full of nervous energy that reminded Shepard of how Thane had stood, hours earlier, before telling her about Kolyat. She stepped closer, coming up beside her old friend. "You've been declared an enemy of the Migrant Fleet."

It took a moment for that to sink in, it was nothing she had even begun to expect. She blinked once, and devoted a long moment of thought to all the possible reasons this could have come to pass. Nothing sprang to mind and she ran her fingers through her shoulder-length curls and put one hand on her hip. "Um. Okay. Why?" She asked finally.

"They haven't told me. Quarians never send information over unsecured channels, especially not into the ships of the people they're declaring enemies." She turned to face her again. "All they said was that you were compromising the safety of the Fleet."

Shepard leaned against a towering stack of ammunition reserves, shoving her hands in her pockets as she wracked her mind for anything that might have brought this about. She could feel Tali's eyes on her, but could only shrug helplessly as she met her gaze again. "I don't know what to tell you Tali. Only that I would never jeopardize the Migrant Fleet."

"I know you wouldn't." The other woman replied, sounding so confident that it sent a stab of vivid emotion through Shepard's chest. She smiled slightly and stood straighter as Tali continued. "But I can't convince the Admirals of it while standing on your ship half a galaxy away from them."

"Or if you fly in there on her." Shepard nodded her understanding. "So you want to take another ship there, and see if you can convince them?"

"The alternative would be exile. Without a trial, this time." Tali replied, sounding like she was struggling not to laugh and cry at the same time. No doubt it was difficult for her, being accused of treason not once but twice, when she loved her people so unconditionally. She shook her head after a moment, one hand balling into a tight fist against her thigh, her luminescent eyes narrowing to slits of angry frustration. "But I know where I belong. I'm a member of your crew Shepard. You are my family, and what we're doing is too important for me to turn my back on. I got used to the idea of exile the first time around, this time it isn't nearly as daunting. I'll do whatever you need me to do."

Shepard stared blankly at the young woman in front of her, remembering when she first met the masked alien in an alley painted with blood, lost in the red light and senseless noise of the Wards. It had seemed a gambit, taking along someone who had appeared to her as scarcely more than a child at the time, but she had seen something there. Something special. She had never expected that something to become this. This confident, strong woman in front of her, this deep and unmovable friendship that anchored her in the tempest of all that raged around her. After a moment she nodded, and swallowed hard, assembling a plan of action.

"The trust and stability of the Migrant Fleet is important, for you, for me and for the galaxy, especially when the Reapers get here." She mused, rubbing at her often-broken nose as she paced back and forth in the narrow lanes between the cargo. "And the only way I can defend myself against these charges is if I know what they are. When we dock in the Citadel I want you to charter an independent ship to take you to the Migrant Fleet, find out everything you can and relay the information to me on the Normandy. We'll build our strategy from there, hopefully one that involves each of us getting back on friendly terms with the Admirals."

Tali nodded, her shoulders relaxing a little bit as she breathed a sigh of relief that rattled through the scrubbers installed in her helmet. "Thanks, Shepard. Hopefully all it'll take is another stirring speech to clear our names."

They smiled at each other, or at least Shepard was pretty sure they did, and she put one arm affectionately over the quarians shoulders as they left the cargo bay. "Leave it all up to me." She assured her. "If a rousing speech from the White Knight of the Terminus Systems doesn't light a metaphorical fire under them, I'm sure an actual fire will get the job done just as well."

Tali gave her a sly, sideways look from the depths of her opaque helmet as they made their way slowly down the hallway. "If I didn't know you better, Shepard, I'd day you liked that nickname." She commented, sounding amused. Her eyes widened as Shepard shrugged her shoulders, not denying it.

"I can't complain. Like I said, it sure as shit beats 'the Butcher of Torfan'." She made a face, as though she had smelt or tasted something foul as they came abreast of the doorway leading back to Tali's station in engineering and paused. Tali crossed her arms over her slight chest and cocked her head to the side inquisitively.

"No one calls you that. Not after everything you've done." She scoffed, sounding completely horrified at the idea that anyone could. Shepard just shook her head, wondering how Tali had managed to keep such an optimistic view of other people intact after all these years of fighting the worst the galaxy had to offer.

"Not to my face. Or to yours, knowing what we are to each other. But people still know the name, they still use it when they want to throw my mistakes back in my face, or remind me that I'm only human. And even when they don't say it, I can see it. In their eyes." She sighed. "Or maybe I just think I do, because I see it so clearly in my own mind. Either way, it's nice to think I'm being remembered for some of the good I'm doing now, rather than the evil I did all those years ago. And even the White Knight isn't as stupid and corny as the Saviour of the Citadel."

They both laughed, a mixture of amusement and bitter irony at the memory of what that title meant to her now. It was sour, a tattered mantle set upon her shoulders by people who had sold her out and abandoned her before her corpse was even cold. This new moniker was something she could use, could shape to her own will. She was no longer the political hot-button, the poster child, the fabricated symbol cooked up by media experts to deceive and manipulate the public. She nodded firmly at her friend, her jaw setting as she thought about that.

"Are you heading back up to see Thane?" Tali asked, as Shepard automatically headed to the elevator. She paused, one hand raised to activate the holopad and then turned slowly around. The smile was gone from her face and she faced Tali with grave stoicism. The quarian seemed bemused, taking a concerned step forward. "Sorry, did I hit a sensitive spot? I just thought…" She trailed off. "I don't know what I thought. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked."

"No." Shepard held up a hand, stalling her retreat. "No, it's fine. Well, it's not fine, but that's not your fault. It's just gotten really… complicated. I'm not really sure what to do about it anymore, and it…"

Tali waited for her to finish as she struggled with words, indefinable feelings welling up in her chest like lead weights. She had no way to describe exactly how conflicted she was, her frustration steadily mounting against her apparently boundless affection for him, his emotional distance mingled with their irresistible magnetism. As the silence dragged on, growing heavy, she blasted a helpless sigh through her nose and dropped her head into one hand, squeezing at the aching bump rising out of the centre of her nose.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Tali asked finally. Shepard looked up, one black and orange eye glowing between her fingers. After a moment she nodded, wordlessly. Tali seemed to hesitate, as though she had not really expected her offer to be accepted. After a moment she motioned Shepard back toward the cargo hold, the one place in the ship where no one ever went without a reason. Once inside, she climbed up on top of a stack of supplies and sat down, her legs awkwardly folded in front of her, arms crossed and resting on her knees. Shepard flopped out on her back, bracing her legs against another, taller stack of crates beside them and stretched her arms out. She felt stretched, her exhausted bones straining against her skin, like she could drop off right there with nothing more than a little bit of peace and quiet.

"So what's going on?" Tali asked after a moment of silence. Shepard closed her eyes and after a moment of thought folded one of her hands over it. When light shone through her eyelids her eternally vigilant mechanical eyes often tried to focus on the tiny shadows of blood vessels. "Garrus said you were happy."

"I was." Shepard replied, not able to stop the small smile that perked at her lips at the mention of Garrus. "But things have changed."

She was not sure how long she talked, describing the empty confusion of her torturous first days after waking up in the Lazarus Project science station and the dull apathy that had gradually taken its place. She described not knowing what she was fighting for, of the deadness that had possessed her, the hopelessness she had struggled with even as they fought their way across the Terminus Systems, even as they destroyed the Collectors and sailed victoriously home. None of it had mattered to her.

"I was waiting to die again." She finished finally. "I didn't know it at the time, but that's all life was to me. Time ticking by, so slowly, so painfully, as I waited for everything to end."

"I had no idea." Tali said, the first words she had offered since Shepard had begun her long explanation. "But that's not the way it is anymore? You're better now?"

"Somewhat. It's hard." Shepard replied, opening her eyes finally and looking over at her friend who was watching her with large, luminescent round eyes. "I just try to take it one day at a time. Sometimes everything seems so hopeless it's hard to get out of bed in the morning. But I keep going, because finally there's something in my life that's worth fighting for. Worth living for. And he doesn't… it's the same for him. But he doesn't know if he really wants it."

"So you're afraid if you lose him you'll go back to how you were?" Tali asked, keenly. Shepard sighed after a moment and shook her head, brushing soft, half-formed curls of yellow hair out of her eyes.

"I don't know. Maybe. Mostly I just want to hold onto this feeling. The feeling of having something valuable in my own life, of having a vested interest in what happens to the galaxy. I can't live for everyone else all the time, Tali. I… I want something that's for me." She sighed again. "And I want him to be happy, to do what's right for him. Because I love him, and people always want what's best for the ones they love. It's complicated, like I said."

Tali nodded. "I know all about complicated relationships." She said, sounding suddenly exhausted. Shepard pushed herself to her elbows, studying her with keen dark eyes.

"What do you mean? Garrus treats you right doesn't he?" She asked.

"Of course he does." Tali replied, waving one two-fingered hand in dismissal of her concerned tone. "But it's hard you know? Trying to be close to someone when there's always a mask, a suit and a wall of tech separating you from the outside world. Well, you don't know."

"I know what it's like to have walls." Shepard replied. After a moment, Tali nodded her understanding and the two of them sat in silence, each wrapped in dark thoughts.

"Maybe you should take a few days off when we dock on the Citadel." Shepard suggested suddenly. "You can charter a ship and spend a few days with Garrus while it gets itself ready. Take in the elcor Hamlet Joker keeps cracking jokes about."

Tali turned back to her, looking startled. "Do we have time for that?" She asked.

Shepard shrugged. "It's gotten to the point that a couple days isn't really going to make a difference either way. Everyone could use some shore leave. It's been months since most of the people onboard have set foot on real ground. Not the Citadel has a lot of it, but at least it's better than staying on the ship for another year. The war with the Reapers isn't going to go to shit just because we let our hair down for a couple days." She sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than her friend, but she had always been the type of person who found it difficult to hope for the best.

"Well… yeah. That would be nice." She could hear the smile in the other woman's voice and she swung down off the stacked supplies. Where nervous energy had made her twitchy and rigid before she now seemed to loosen, her shoulders relaxing and her clenched hands unfurling. She looked happier than anyone had in days, maybe even weeks. Shepard dragged herself down after her, glad that at least one of them had gotten something good out of this talk. As they left the cargo bay and both headed toward the elevator they managed to divert from serious talk, chatting about Citadel attractions and dextro-restaurants that the two of them might want to try.

"Shepard, about Thane." Tali cut in as they arrived on the crew deck, turning toward her with sudden seriousness. Shepard rubbed at her neck and met her eyes after a moment of hesitation. "I think… everything you said to me. About feeling dead, about having nothing to live for until you found… whatever it is you want to call it that exists between you. Tell him that. So at least if he wants to walk away he knows what it is he's walking away from."

"Tell the guy I love him?" Shepard asked, her laughter humourless and dark. "What happens if he does walk away after that? Doesn't leave a lot of room for us to go back to being just friends." Tali nodded in agreement.

"Not really, no. But can you really do that anyway? Wouldn't you rather go on, knowing that you did everything you could?" When her friend could not respond she just put one hand gently on her shoulder. "Just think about it. It's better to end things like this without any regrets."

As she stepped out of the elevator and Shepard hit the button that would lift her back to her own quarters she did think about that, at least somewhat. Suddenly, she was exhausted, her internal muscles aching in time with her pounding head. When she made her way out, toward her quarters, she was thinking only about rest. She could feel the heaviness of it on her eyes, pulling her feet down until her toes scuffed against the floor. When the door to her quarters whooshed open, expelling a gust of cool air, she relished the feeling of it prickling along her skin and let a small, tired smile touch her lips. It froze, and then melted away when she saw who was standing at her desk, righting the toppled frame in which resided her medal of honour.

"Thane." She said softly, and he turned to look at her. "I didn't expect to see you again so soon. Lately there seems to be weeks between our conversations."

"Indeed." He agreed softly, folding his hands behind his back. "But I did not think it right to leave… this… situation. At least not the way I did this morning."

"You said you were sorry. Repeatedly." She reminded him. "And I already said you didn't do anything wrong. For fucks sake, Krios, I like it rough sometimes. A few little bruises is nothing to lose your shit over."

"But you didn't like it." He pointed out. "And I knew that, but I kept going."

"Yeah, well, it happens." She replied. "People lose control, they do things they regret. They apologize, they're forgiven and they move on. Stronger. That's just what happens, it's a part of life. Clinging to your guilt doesn't make anything any better for anyone. Trust me, I know."

He paused, looking like he had expected anything but that to come out of her and quirked one scaly brow. As she stepped forward he stepped away, to the side, so they ended up just circling each other, each trying to get some gauge of the situation. Eventually they stopped and Shepard leaned back against her desk, crossing her arms and fixing him with her unwavering mechanical gaze. He shifted under her scrutiny but did not look away.

"It doesn't happen to me." He said finally. "I don't lose control. Not like that."

"Obviously, you do." She cut in, her voice hard. "That doesn't make you special, or horrible. It just makes you…" She paused, a wry smile on her lips. "Well, I was going to say human. But it just makes you a person, Thane. Everyone makes mistakes. It's up to us to help each other through them, to help each other grow and learn from them, so that we can grow as people. We can't do it alone."

"I've done it alone my entire life." He insisted, his voice flaring with sudden passion. "Everything I've encountered I've overcome without the slightest flicker of emotional complication. It's who I am."

"You hated who you were when I met you. You said you were dead, an empty shell going through the mechanical functions of life." She replied. It was remarkably easy for her to stay calm, thinking back to what Tali had said. She could not change what he was going to do, the choices he was going to make. She could only say what she wanted and needed to say and hope it was enough. "Every time we talk like this you tell me you don't want to go back to that. But here we are, having this same stupid conversation again. What's the fucking point? Do you want me or not? Are you dead or alive?"

She had not noticed that she had stepped forward until he grabbed onto her, his hands circling her wrists as her hands came up to touch him. The hot, spicy smell of him was on her again, filling her mind as completely as his hallucinogenic kisses. His dark eyes were open wide, the blush of green touching their centre once more. They stared at each other for a long moment, emotions flying through the air more effectively than words could.

"Of course I want you." He replied finally. "Why do you think I keep coming back here, back to you, knowing how painful it will inevitably be? The longer I'm away from you the more you possess me. My mind is full of you, the way you smell, the way you taste, the heat of you." He pulled her forward, against him.

"Then what are you so fucking scared of?" Shepard hissed, her hands balling into fists against his chest. He said nothing, bowing his head and she felt his grip on her wrists loosen and eventually he released her entirely. She did not move away, did not move forward. She felt his tears falling, onto her hands this time, and finally reached one hand up to cup his cheek. For a moment it seemed like he might flinch away from her, but in the end he stayed frozen in place, staring down.

"The last time I loved someone it drove me to do terrible things. Unforgivable things." He said. "I'm scared of dying and having to face the burden they left on my soul. More than that, I'm scared that you will die and I will do the same thing again. I would have, if you had died on Mindoir. I would have done everything all over again."

"You don't know that. Caught in the heavy emotions of seeing someone you care about almost die you think all sorts of things, make all sorts of rash decisions you never carry through on when the adrenaline settles. You don't know what you would have done, because I didn't die. Just accept that." She said, sighing and putting her head in her hands. She took a moment to gather her thoughts and looked up. "Even if you did decide to kill everyone, Garrus would have stopped you. Or Tali. Or, fuck, Jacob and Miranda. You aren't alone anymore, Thane. Or at least you don't have to be. Not if you don't want to be. I… look. There's nothing more I can do. I just…" She took another deep breath. Tali was right, if she was going to go on with no regrets she had to just suck it up and say it. If he still wanted to walk away, then at least she would know she had done everything she could.

"I love you. I want what's best for you. So you can make whatever choice you need to, but in the end you know as well as I do that fading back to sleep isn't what you want. And it isn't for the best. Not for anyone. So if you really want to do the right thing then stay here. Stay with me. Help me, and let me help you." His large eyes widened and she had to force herself not to look away from the intensity of his gaze.

"I don't know how." He said, bitterness infusing his voice. "I don't know how to be like you, Shepard. Siha. I don't know how to be a hero."

"I'm not asking you to be a hero." She replied. "I'm just asking you to be here. To be with me. That's all I've ever wanted, Rama. All I've ever needed. Just let yourself be alive, and let me love you."

His arms were around her, she realized, and he was holding her so tightly it seemed odd that she had barely noticed before. He buried his face in the warm curve of her neck and she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and held him close. His breath was ragged with need, and he shuddered with the intensity of his emotions as he clung to her as she squeezed her eyes closed and stroked the back of his head gently.

"I pulled away so I could stop myself from loving you." He said softly, pulling back and looking at her through dark, hooded eyes. "But it was already too late. I can't do it. I can't go back, I can't fade into my battle sleep, I can't slip away into the simplicity of not feeling. I already loved you, Siha. And it has just become more powerful."

She smiled, really smiled, for the first time in so long that it felt like her face had forgotten how. After the briefest moment, he managed to smile back, and she cupped his face in her hands, running her thumbs gently over the ridges of her scales. It was wonderful to hear him say it, to finally slip out of the uncertain limbo of their relationship and onto more solid footing. Wonderful, and terrifying. Soldiers loving each other was discouraged in the Alliance for reasons beyond simple protocol, and she knew it. But still, she laughed and threw her arms around his neck as he ran his hands down her back.

"You never even told me what that means." She said as they made their way down to her living quarters. She was too exhausted, and still much too sore, for any sort of physical intimacy but she did not even have to explain that. As she sprawled out on her bed and he shrugged out of his jacket before crawling in next to her she knew that there was no such expectation. He simply pulled her into his arms again, his fingers sliding under her shirt to trace the valley of her waist and the indent of her belly button. She kicked her boots off, over the side of the bed, and sighed, stretching her toes and curling up against his chest.

"The Siha are warrior angels, aspected to the goddess Arashu. In drell lore they appear as women dressed in white, with the fires of the sun burning in their eyes. Fierce, noble protectors of the good and the innocent. Avatars of wrath." He whispered, stroking her hair, the soft warmth of all her human differences.

"You're a sap." She teased as she inhaled his deep, exotic scent. It seemed so familiar to her now, so right. It had been strange to go so long without it. She traced his hand against her stomach, splaying her fingers along his and measuring the differences between them. Green on gold, rough soldiers calluses alongside his smooth scales. "A great big adorable sap."

"We match." He rumbled, sounding amused. She would have said something else, but her eyes slid closed sleep was suddenly on her again. Even when he shifted and drew her closer, burying his face in her hair as he sought his own rest she did not wake. As they slept, they curled even tighter together, a knot of warmth in the face of the cold all around them.


	20. Authors Note

Hey guys.

First off, I want to apologize for being uncommunicative despite some comments asking whether I would be continuing this story. I had some personal things to attend to in my life and that left me with no time to play ME or write, as well as a distinctive lack of muse. I appreciate the comments, and the fact that so many people really seem to enjoy this fiction. It makes me feel very accomplished as a writer.

So do not despair! The Destroyer is not dead. In fact, it has mutated so far beyond what I thought it was going to be when I started that I barely recognize it anymore. It has more potential for plot then I thought it would, and I enjoy writing this Shepard as much as you enjoy reading it.

That said, I think there are some major problems with this version of it. Because of that, I have decided to stop writing it and focus on retelling a similar story with the same character in what will hopefully be a much more interesting plot. This will not be an edited version of the same story. It will include completely new scenes as well as thoroughly rewritten versions of the scenes we've already encounter. It will also (hopefully) be beta-read and have less spelling mistakes and jumbled sentences as a result. It will feature the Colonist/Ruthless blend of Shepard, her exploration of her past, and her relationship with Thane.

So that's what I'm doing right now, and what I plan to do in the future. You can expect the new Destroyer fic to be published in large chunks rather than in chapters like it is now, and it will probably be sporadic at best since I'm going to college this year, and that promises to absorb a lot of my time. I hope that as I produce it you will enjoy the new fic even more than you enjoyed this one.

Namaste

-K


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